One of my favorite stories comes from the Sufi tradition of mystical Islam. It is a tale that tells us exactly what we will have to face if we endeavor to walk the path of desire.
A man sits in the center of a Middle Eastern marketplace crying his eyes out, a platter of peppers spilled out on the ground before him.
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; Continue reading
We want freedom for our country but not at the expense or exploitation of others, not so as to degrade other countries. I do not want the freedom of India if it means the extinction of England or the disappearance of Englishmen. I want the freedom of my country so other countries may learn something from my free country, so the resources of my country might be utilized for the benefit of mankind.
Just as the cult of patriotism teaches us today that the individual has to die for the family, the family has to die for the village, the village for the district, the district for the province and the province for the country, even so a country has to be free in order that it may die if necessary for the benefit of the world. My love, therefore, of nationalism or my idea of nationalism is that my country may become free, that if need be the whole country may die so the human race may live. There is no room for race-hatred there. Let that be our nationalism.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Sit down and be quiet.
You are drunk. And this is the edge of the roof.
Rumi, Sufi mystic, poet, 13th century
It’s unfortunate that life isn’t about constant progress and unending success. Life is circular in form—cycles of light and darkness, success and failure, order and chaos. Seldom do we appreciate the necessity for these opposites. We’d rather just have it be successful and wonderful all the time. But we all have to pass through life’s cycles, gracefully or not. When we personally are confronted by the downside of these cycles, such as when we get stuck, how do we respond?
“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Continue reading
When people wanted to kill a bear in the ancient times, they hung a heavy log over a bowl of honey. The bear would push the log away in order to eat the honey.Failure is unavoidable. There’s no way to avoid times of crushing defeat, great loss, terrible regret. We might like to think that “failure is not an option,” but it’s guaranteed to appear and reappear throughout our lives. This is just how life works. It helps to know this ahead of time. Or to learn it very quickly. What’s essential is how we work with failure, what we do once its ugly face appears.
ONE TUSK 