Lessons of Life
Advice is freely given, but lessons are hard fought. They cannot be narrated, nor related, nor taught.
The only narrator and teacher is Life itself. Lessons that we learn ultimately become part of what we are, and form our principles, and our motivations. Advice, on the other hand, is easily given, and easily lost. But lessons, lessons last a lifetime. Sometimes even longer.
Herman Hesse’s Demian
“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than the path that leads to himself.”
John Burdett’s Bangkok Haunts
A tolerant smile. “Of course I went mad. For a monk, what the world calls sanity is a whorish compromise.”
“But something saved you. You seem okay now.”
A curious expression. “Saved? There is nothing to save, my friend. You are talking like a Christian. You cannot cast yourself into the Unknowable in the hope that the gesture will buy you salvation–you have to jump for the hell of it. In a nirvanic universe there can be no salvation because we are never really lost–or found. The choice is simply between nirvana and ignorance. That is the adult truth the Buddha urges upon us. We are the sum of our burning. No burning, no being.”
John O’Hurley’s It’s Ok To Miss the Bed on the First Jump
I am of those I’ve touched, and the best of what they are.
