When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.
Maxine Hong KingstonRead
Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
Interpretation
Joy and life can only be experienced in the current moment, not in the past or future.
This quote by Maxine Hong Kingston emphasizes the importance of living in the moment. It suggests that true joy and the essence of life are found in our present experiences, rather than being tied to memories of the past or aspirations for the future. This perspective encourages mindfulness and embracing the current moment to fully appreciate life.
In practice
In a mindfulness workshop, when discussing the importance of being present.
When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.
There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.
In a time of destruction, create something.
We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.
I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.
I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.
Do not say that every day you spend on this earth is a day closer to dying. Every day you spend on this earth is a day closer to finally living.
It is youthβs felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future
Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.
Grief is accepting the reality of what is. That is grief's job and purpose-to allow us to come to terms with the way things really are, so that we can move on. Grief is a gift of God. Without it, we would all be condemned to a life of continually denying reality, arguing or protesting against reality, and never growing from the realities we experience.
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