Today's
quotation:
Clay is fashioned
into vessels; it is on their empty hollowness
that their
use depends. Doors and windows are cut out to
make
a dwelling, and on the empty space within, its use
depends. Thus, while the existence of things may be
good,
it is the non-existence in them that makes them
serviceable.
Lao
Tzu
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Today's
Meditation:
Sometimes
I forget to slow down and think about things more
clearly. I often forget to appreciate what people
aren't as well as what they are. I know someone
who's very self-serving and unreliable, which can be a
major annoyance. But on the other hand, this person
isn't rude, isn't argumentative, doesn't abuse alcohol or
drugs, doesn't have an abusive personality. . . . and the
list goes on. What this person isn't--but easily
could be--far outweighs the supposed "negative"
traits that I see.
Even
more frustrating to me is my tendency to want to see
people fill their empty spaces. This person should
be more giving and should focus more on others, I think,
but that thought is simply me trying to determine what
another human being should be--and it doesn't work that
way. If generosity is one of this person's
"empty spaces," then that's the way it is, and I
don't have the right to judge him or her on that
fact. Perhaps this person will be the most generous
person in the world five years from now, but he or she
just hasn't learned the necessary lessons yet.
This
world is a marvelous, magical place. So much of what
it gives us is absence and emptiness, because it knows
just how important those two things are. Socially,
we tend to want to do, to fill our time and to judge
things and people based on what's there, and not on what's
not there. If we were to judge a coffee cup that
way, we'd be upset that there's so much empty,
"wasted" space inside the cup. But the cup
itself has been crafted to create that empty space, for
it's that empty space that makes it a cup.
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