371. Natural Desire

Our desires are numerous and their power influences us. Sometimes we want so much so badly that we feel there is no choice but to restrain our desires. And when we learn that attachment to desire can produce incredible suffering, we might even start to believe that all desire is harmful.

But desire itself is neither good nor bad. It is a natural consequence of the kind of beings we are and the way we relate to our world. Through reflective consciousness, we develop a sense of causality, time, and distinction between objects. We form beliefs about the world’s present state through our experience of it, and we form desires about its future state. While we sometimes directly choose what we desire, this process more often happens automatically.

370. Feeling Through Art

Your sadness is so vague that you’re unable to express it until you hear a song that gives it a voice. Your rage is so incandescent that you cannot properly grasp it until you see a film that consolidates your emotion. You are so madly in love that you doubt the reality of your feelings until you read a poem that allows you to accept your joy. These are some of the many ways art helps you understand yourself.

369. Bodily Needs

There are moments when the pressures of life become too much to bear and I need to take a break. I need to step out of the chaos of the world and find some calm and quiet, if only to give my senses an opportunity for respite. Sometimes it’s not just my senses that need relief but my entire body that is in need of care.

I want to give my attention to my own needs but I feel guilty about doing so. I know that it’s important for my attention to remain open and that closing myself off from the world will reduce my sensitivity to it. When my attention is limited, my ability to see what is needed and necessary is limited, which means my compassion will also be limited.

368. The Response

She never stops. To stop would be to surrender and there will be no surrendering. Not while she is still alive. Her direction is forward. Only and always. The world around her is in trouble, so she has redoubled her efforts. She refuses to allow the world to crush her. It will try, but she is going forward.

When it feels like the world is against her in every way, she pushes with all of her being. People often ignore her and sometimes they disparage her efforts. But she doesn’t care about any of that. She takes it as a signal that she isn’t pressing hard enough and she comes back with even more. She will try everything she can possibly try. There is no effort she will fail to bring, no action she will not attempt.

367. Unbounded Life

When we talk about life, we tend to do so in individual terms. We focus on the life of the particular physical body that we have, which has a definite beginning and will have a definite ending. But as our awareness of the relationship between the individual self and the whole that is the world expands and deepens, the distinction between bodies becomes less important. We discover that each and every individual existence is continuously connected to the existence of others. This interdependence extends to the world itself, without which no individual life would be possible.

366. The Force Of Attachment

Think about your worst defeat, the time you tried your very best and still did not succeed. Think about the most embarrassing day of your life, the one you will never be able to forget. Think about the death of a loved one who is still living, an inevitability that you dread. Think intensely about these things. Think about the worst parts of them, the parts you most want to avoid.

365. Bad Habits

A habit can form quietly and easily get out of hand. I’m acting in a way that I know I shouldn’t, but it seems to happen without choice. I know I can’t go on like this. I can’t keep harming myself by allowing the habitual behaviour to continue. I’ve already decided to stop, but despite my efforts to control myself, there is no change.

I’m trying to hold myself to my decision, and I’m frustrated by my inability to take control. I desperately want to prevent the habit from continuing. I feel like I should be able to do this just by imposing control over my actions. But this doesn’t work because my habit is already a form of control.

364. Truth And Fiction

When you’re reading a work of fiction, you might encounter something that doesn’t seem right. It could be anything, but suppose it’s the reaction of a particular character to a terrible discovery. The reaction reported in the story doesn’t feel plausible to you because you know you would never react in that way.

But allowing for the fact that the person in the story is not you, you might be willing to accept that they could respond quite differently than you would. You would let go of the discrepancy and continue reading. You know that since this is a work of fiction, you shouldn’t expect absolute realism from everything you find in it. Even if the implausibilities continued to stack up, you might press on, accepting that the world of the story is just different from the world you live in.

363. In Order To Live

I’m tired of your nonsense. You keep giving me reasons why you can’t when I already know you can. You have the ability. You can’t keep pretending that you don’t. You keep saying that it’s too much, that you don’t know where to start, that you can’t figure out how to do it. But none of that is true.

You could start today but you don’t. You could at least figure out what your first step might be, but you don’t even do that. Yes, yes, you have all these concerns that you can’t ignore. About how you don’t have time. About how you need to focus on other things. About how it’ll never work anyway. Somehow you have time to think of excuses but none to actually do something.