How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence... p 259
Interpretation
Pain is temporary, and despite its intensity, it does not last forever.
This quote reflects on the nature of pain, suggesting that while it can feel overwhelming and significant at the moment, it ultimately fades away. It highlights a human tendency to want to hold onto pain and give it lasting importance, but it reminds us that even our suffering is transient, inviting us to recognize the potential for healing and relief.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming hardship.
Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.
In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.
Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.
It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson.
Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
Common sense is something that everyone needs, few have, and none think they lack.
But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much.
Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.
Sometimes the heart is so heavy that we turn away from it and forget that its throbbing is the wisest message of life, a wordless message that says, "Live, be, move, rejoice -- you are alive!" Without the heart's wise rhythm, we could not exist.
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