I added this little nugget to quotes today. I’d love to reflect a bit more.
Heart Like A River
If you pour a handful of salt into cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to cook, wash and drink. The river is immense, and has the capacity to receive, embrace and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.
So the big question is: how we help our hearts grow?
- Thich Nhat Hanh in the book How to Love.
Let’s step back. An opinion on the world around us stems from an expectation, a kind of thought. Such an expectation is a function of principles, values and our innermost mental tendencies that define who we’re. We must note that we inherit bits and pieces of these from our environment as well.
Tendencies are okay at their place. The problem arises when they cause a misalignment - one between me and the not-me.
The me enforces the not-me with a golden shackle of things the latter ought to do. Problem doesn’t end there. Often the not-me doesn’t comply. It cannot.
All of that makes the me miserable and hopeless for the failed attempt at molding the world as I want to see it.
The solution: be magnanimous; so much large that the me starts encompassing the not-me as its own.
Hug the world for what it is.