Will We Choose Fear or Compassion?

Every day when we wake up, we have a choice.

Will we choose fear or will we choose compassion and love?

These are very strong, but I’ve learned in my short 28 years that anger and fear exhaust me, whereas if I do work out of love and compassion and kindness, I’m actually nourished.

It’s a sustainable energy.

— Ocean Vuong, What Scares Writer and Zen Buddhist Ocean Vuong

• Sick Time, Only Sick
  This is the correct Zen sickness: sick time, only sick. No choice, no checking, not dependent, only sick. Then sick is not sick. This is high-class practice and a high-class education. — Zen Master Seung Sahn in Only Don’t Know
• It’s Time, She’ll Say
  It’s Time, she’ll say, False prophet, that seeks flesh and gnaws the bone. — Ekphrasis: Her Expression by Yiannis Doukas, translated by A. E. Stallings
• I Am Too Alone In The World, And Yet Not Alone Enough
  Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. — Rainer Maria Rilke I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that… Read more: I Am Too Alone In The World, And Yet Not Alone Enough
• When You Rise, Kiss The Tombstone Of Your Past
  When you rise, kiss the tombstone of your past and step barefoot into the garden of the future, the garden of infinitely forking paths — Maria Popova from poem How to Change Your Life
• But I Have My Life
  But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there. — Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did.  I don’t. — Veronica Roth, Divergent My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in. —… Read more: But I Have My Life