Writers need respite from words. After a day of wordsmithing, I need to escape the linear chute of language into other symbol systems, other frames of knowledge, other mindscapes and creativities. I’m fine with images or with a film or television program where words may come towards me but require little in return of language.
My body needs to be refreshed from the postures of writing as well. There aren’t that many postures of writing so it usually means sitting. Sitting at my desk is not awfully different from sitting at a café table or holding my notebook on my lap in the living room. I suppose I could get a kneeling chair or write standing up as Virginia Woolf was said to do. If I am the reincarnation of VW (another story), I should take a look at this option (and stay away from rivers).
Walking, gardening, cooking, quilting, and tai chi are my favored relief activities when I am exhausted mentally or physically by hours of scribbling or clicking away at one or another of my keyboards. If I were a musician, I can imagine that playing my oboe or guitar or piano would be another release from the garments of prose.
Walking delivers a cool, refreshing shower of sensory droplets. I see the house with new owners change slightly day by day, smell the tiny white blossoms on this hedge and that, notice the uneven sidewalk blocks and don’t trip, feel the air under this heavy shade, pump thigh muscles with oxygenated blood, suck in that belly, feel a stretched spine reaching for the sky, and more.
Walking is also a meditation on the world outside my head. Writing pushes at my skull from the inside, as if something is trying to get out. Walking equalizes the pressure by exposing me to exterior stimuli: other people, scenery, traffic, little scenarios transacted within my view, wall murals, public buildings, public services, costumes, disguises, and temptations. I step outside my front door and enter the pages of Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? or Richard Scarry’s What do People Do All Day? There is so much bright color and high contrast some days and so much mystical haze other days.
Walking brings worms into my field of vision. I don’t need to see worms slowly drying on the sidewalks every day, but if I didn’t ever see them at all, how much less I would know about my own environment. Like witnessing the death of worms, I see other peripheral stories abandoned in the grass or perambulating through my slice of world. Today it’s a red plastic bat dropped on a side lawn and a man in a white sports jacket entering a cafe. I could pause to reflect on the stories that murmur around them in a tempting nimbus, but then I would be writing!
Walking brings me face to face with the dilemmas of eye contact and greeting strangers. I don’t have a predetermined strategy, so it is a new decision to be made twenty times (or more) on a typical walk. Unlike the confusion of greeting strangers, a clear advantage of walking is spontaneous conversations with neighbors hanging out clothes or planting hosta in a shady corner garden. The threads of neighborhood are spun into fabric by such encounters.
Mark Strand’s poem, “Keeping Things Whole” is one way to sum up the experience of walking. This is an excerpt.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Everyone gardens for their own reasons, too. I garden to keep the wilderness at bay. I’m not even sure that what I do out there can properly be called gardening anyway. I believe that in a past life I was a machete-toting bushwacker of some sort. I have this imagined quest going on inside my head while I am weeding or clearing overgrown brush. Just the very word, quest, feels resonant to me as if Quetzalcoatl was my middle name and jungle was my game.
My “gardening” habit is typically neglect for two or three years while I am writing intensively, and then a year of hacking my way through prolific vines and sharp thorny hedges with sharp tools. I may have fallen and impaled myself on a crude prototype of these tools in one of my lives because I am vividly aware of the potential piercing power of the blades I am holding during battles with sinuous woody serpents.
While sweating and ripping and shredding in my little swath of wilderness, I am in constant conversation with the invasive species. I compliment them on their cleverness of disguises, on their audacity in climbing my house, and on their innocence in being marked for death or disruption when they may have tremendously valuable, but unknown, properties. This activity, taken in small doses after hours at the keyboard, is refreshing and salutary. In larger doses, it might be deemed psychotic. I shower immediately afterwards because poison ivy is flourishing this year.
Cooking might seem to be a merely domestic activity, especially when a woman works at home. To me it is a primitive pleasure. I’ve seen amateur chefs labor for hours with numerous, costly ingredients to present a fluffy, complex amuse bouche that barely skims the taste buds. This isn’t my refreshment of choice after a day of writing. I am restored and rebalanced by chopping and stirring. Risotto, jambalaya, or soup is the best holiday from vocabulary I can imagine.
Quilting is my newest reprieve from hours of lexical maneuverings. I get up from my desk chair at one end of the house and walk to the dining room table at the farthest end where a cornucopia of colors and shapes revives my eyes.
My tools of quilting are so completely different from my tools of writing! What a relief to pick up a rotary blade or a long, cool plank of ruled plastic. The numbers I use don’t beg to be strung together or manipulated; they just want to be obeyed in their most literal sense, no connotation or interpretation allowed.
After working in black and white all day, I am a big fan of purple and red with turquoise trim. Just looking at the juxtaposition of contrasting batiks on my table reminds me of those little Smarties candies, a burst of sugar and flavor right where you need it.
I love the little pieces of fabric spread like gems under the dining room chandelier. They are real; they have textures and shapes. I actually made them with my own hands and I will touch them again to make more out of them.
Like writing, I suppose, these humming bits of excitement will become more meaningful as they are joined with other little bits. The sum will be greater than the parts. But where the protocols of writing impose a linear direction most of the time, these modest triangles, squares, and rectangles will be stitched together along all sides, forming multi-dimensional images, perhaps summoning up a foaming, surging storm at sea.
I can be exhausted by 7:00 p.m. and still turn to my colors and shapes and feel invigorated for two more hours of creativity on the other side of the house. Yesterday when I finished trimming tiny triangles from “little sister” squares within squares, I let the scraps flow through my fingers. What can I do with these fractures of the spectrum? I tossed big handfuls of light, color, and shape, for now, into the litter jar of thread and fabric clippings. Quilting is about deliberately making use of scraps, but where do we draw the line? Is it below an inch? Is it a single word?
Tai chi releases me from the compulsion of words through welcome silence and a shift to kinesthetic sense. Others in my class ask our teacher about where to put their left foot during a repulse monkey move, but I ask her, “What is in your mind when you are doing tai chi?” She tells me to focus on one of the six principles of loosened joints, slow continuous motion, moving against resistance, conscious weight transference, upright posture and alignment, and quiet mindful focus. Even the process of enumerating the six principles helps me relax out of the profusion of gushing language where I live most of the day. Gratefully, I move . . . slowly, continuously, against resistance, and with mindful focus . . . to keep things whole.
For Your Writing
Thinking about what we do as RESPITE from writing is not the same as figuring out what we do to AVOID writing. Make three lists: (1) what you are intending to write, (2) what you do to avoid writing, and (3) what you do as relief after writing. Pick one from each list and do them all today!
Quotation for Percolation:
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” Edwin Schlossberg
Monday, July 6, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Feed Me!
We have all heard the expression, “food for thought,” but what does it mean, literally, to be attentive to our mental diet?
I can’t say that I’ve developed a food triangle, or even basic food groups for thinking. I do know that I’m hungry all the time, and I’m determined to take stock of what’s in my pantry and maybe even start a food-for-thought diary. If I look around—on the bedside table, on my desk, beside my desk, on the piano stool next to my favorite chair, on the kitchen counter, I can see evidence of hearty meals and healthy snacks, but also of munchies and sugary sweets.
Books seem like well-balanced meals, but perhaps this is only true if you read them one at a time, straight through. Is a book a well-balanced meal if you get up from the table, snack from the fridge, take a walk, visit a café for a bagel and tea, and then sit back down at the table to finish your steak? A good book can be a steak and potatoes experience, or Cajun blackened chicken and okra, or it can be a three-course vegan extravaganza. Currently, I am (r)eating two novels simultaneously, and I have four additional books warming in the microwave. I’m filling my plate this week with Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and often, after I finish a serving of this entrée, I consume four or five chapters of a murder-mystery manuscript concocted by a dear friend (who is also a terrific cook).
Defrosting, near at hand, I have The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz for my next book group. I’m keeping three other books warm and ready for instant refreshment: Blink (signed copy) by Malcolm Gladwell (a Christmas gift from my daughter), Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily by Maria Messina (on loan from my sister), and The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh (perpetually warm and nourishing; comfort food). Within my sight lines as I write this, I can see five or six more meals ready to be brought to the table.*
If those books are the meals in my larder, what am I enjoying as snacks for thought? This may be more literal than I thought, since I love to read and eat at the same time. There should be a word for this particular bliss. The sounds of crunching and munching are accompaniment and condiment to the euphoria of feasting on words. I reach for a magazine or newspaper with breakfast, lunch, and afternoon refreshments. What could be better . . . not even vitamins. This conversation on conversation inside my head fulfills a whole range of nutritional needs.
We have a subscription to the local daily newspaper that I read standing up in the kitchen, cannibalizing it for the weather, headlines, University highlights, and photos. When I sit down to breakfast or lunch, I seek a broader palate of flavors, one of the weekly or monthly magazines we receive. For light fare, I prefer Newsweek. The photos go well with toast, granola, soups, and sandwiches. For more sophisticated food, The New Yorker provides a richer, deeper experience for the palate. It also engrosses me for longer, stretching lunch right into afternoon snack or possibly all the way into the cocktail hour.
Some weekday meals are leftovers from Sunday’s New York Times. It’s certainly enough to last three or four days! Other classic snacks are FastCompany, any cookbook or food magazine, health newsletters, and, on rare occasions, the catalogs that typically pass through our house in the twenty steps from front door to recycling bin.
If I don’t (r)eat for several days, I feel grumpy and flat. This morning, I located my new issue of FastCompany under my husband’s pile of nutritious reading, and I had it for breakfast. I got calories and energy along with two or three jolts of inspiration in the time it took me to eat a small bowl of granola with walnuts and 2% milk. I clipped a grid of football statistics to discuss with my husband, and I made note of a potential contributor to one of my writing projects. I learned about some new products and trends. Now, after ingesting this food for thought, I am ready and awake to begin the day. Still, I can’t help thinking, “What’s for lunch?”
*Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, Tim Cahill’s Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Per Petterson’s In the Wake, Liza Kerwin’s With Love: Artists’ Letters and Illustrated Notes, and Top 10 Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, & Ghent from DK Eyewitness Travel.
For Your Writing
Keep a food-for-thought journal for several days, making note of reading material, music, conversation, TV, or other stimuli that jolt you into thinking. After you have kept the journal for awhile, choose one or several entries to develop. What thinking arose from your snack on an article in the Sunday paper? Did you sip on an overheard conversation? What thinking arose from the taste?
Quotation for Percolation
“How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.” Vincent van Gogh
I can’t say that I’ve developed a food triangle, or even basic food groups for thinking. I do know that I’m hungry all the time, and I’m determined to take stock of what’s in my pantry and maybe even start a food-for-thought diary. If I look around—on the bedside table, on my desk, beside my desk, on the piano stool next to my favorite chair, on the kitchen counter, I can see evidence of hearty meals and healthy snacks, but also of munchies and sugary sweets.
Books seem like well-balanced meals, but perhaps this is only true if you read them one at a time, straight through. Is a book a well-balanced meal if you get up from the table, snack from the fridge, take a walk, visit a café for a bagel and tea, and then sit back down at the table to finish your steak? A good book can be a steak and potatoes experience, or Cajun blackened chicken and okra, or it can be a three-course vegan extravaganza. Currently, I am (r)eating two novels simultaneously, and I have four additional books warming in the microwave. I’m filling my plate this week with Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and often, after I finish a serving of this entrée, I consume four or five chapters of a murder-mystery manuscript concocted by a dear friend (who is also a terrific cook).
Defrosting, near at hand, I have The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz for my next book group. I’m keeping three other books warm and ready for instant refreshment: Blink (signed copy) by Malcolm Gladwell (a Christmas gift from my daughter), Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily by Maria Messina (on loan from my sister), and The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh (perpetually warm and nourishing; comfort food). Within my sight lines as I write this, I can see five or six more meals ready to be brought to the table.*
If those books are the meals in my larder, what am I enjoying as snacks for thought? This may be more literal than I thought, since I love to read and eat at the same time. There should be a word for this particular bliss. The sounds of crunching and munching are accompaniment and condiment to the euphoria of feasting on words. I reach for a magazine or newspaper with breakfast, lunch, and afternoon refreshments. What could be better . . . not even vitamins. This conversation on conversation inside my head fulfills a whole range of nutritional needs.
We have a subscription to the local daily newspaper that I read standing up in the kitchen, cannibalizing it for the weather, headlines, University highlights, and photos. When I sit down to breakfast or lunch, I seek a broader palate of flavors, one of the weekly or monthly magazines we receive. For light fare, I prefer Newsweek. The photos go well with toast, granola, soups, and sandwiches. For more sophisticated food, The New Yorker provides a richer, deeper experience for the palate. It also engrosses me for longer, stretching lunch right into afternoon snack or possibly all the way into the cocktail hour.
Some weekday meals are leftovers from Sunday’s New York Times. It’s certainly enough to last three or four days! Other classic snacks are FastCompany, any cookbook or food magazine, health newsletters, and, on rare occasions, the catalogs that typically pass through our house in the twenty steps from front door to recycling bin.
If I don’t (r)eat for several days, I feel grumpy and flat. This morning, I located my new issue of FastCompany under my husband’s pile of nutritious reading, and I had it for breakfast. I got calories and energy along with two or three jolts of inspiration in the time it took me to eat a small bowl of granola with walnuts and 2% milk. I clipped a grid of football statistics to discuss with my husband, and I made note of a potential contributor to one of my writing projects. I learned about some new products and trends. Now, after ingesting this food for thought, I am ready and awake to begin the day. Still, I can’t help thinking, “What’s for lunch?”
*Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, Tim Cahill’s Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Per Petterson’s In the Wake, Liza Kerwin’s With Love: Artists’ Letters and Illustrated Notes, and Top 10 Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, & Ghent from DK Eyewitness Travel.
For Your Writing
Keep a food-for-thought journal for several days, making note of reading material, music, conversation, TV, or other stimuli that jolt you into thinking. After you have kept the journal for awhile, choose one or several entries to develop. What thinking arose from your snack on an article in the Sunday paper? Did you sip on an overheard conversation? What thinking arose from the taste?
Quotation for Percolation
“How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.” Vincent van Gogh
Thursday, January 8, 2009
My Mistake; Your Mistake
William approached my study where I was absorbed in a manuscript and said, "I messed up."
William (not his real name) is a completely reliable craftsman who has done a lot of work for us over the past several years. Being nearly incompetent ourselves when it comes to repairing, painting, electrical work, tile, and almost anything else around the house, we have been so pleased to have someone who is careful and competent to take care of these things for us. William is easy to be around, always returns phone calls, and seems to take care of our little jobs as if they were in his own home.
I followed William to the kitchen where we looked at the situation together. When my husband and I decided to purchase twelve double-cell blinds to insulate our windows, we first asked William if he had the time to measure the windows and install the blinds for us. If he didn’t have time, we might not have undertaken the project at all. I created a spreadsheet of the windows with a name for each one and William measured them all and wrote the measurements in large legible numerals on the list.
"I think I wrote the wrong number on the sheet," said William. "This blind is one inch too narrow." William had not yet put the shade into the bracket he had just installed within the window frame next to the stove.
"Let’s see how it looks when you put it up," I suggested, postponing any conclusions until we could see the full effect of the discrepancy. What was going through my mind at that moment? I tested myself to see if I was thinking that I should have measured the windows myself. Nope, I wasn’t thinking that. Was I thinking that if William made the mistake, he should pay to fix it? No, even though he offered to do so immediately, I wasn’t thinking that I could let him do that. Was I angry or upset? No, I was calm and sure that the situation wouldn’t be bad, and if it was bad, it would be fixed easily.
When it was installed, sure enough, the shade was an inch too narrow, but it still covered all the glass of the window, and if you didn’t know to look right at that gap between the shade and the window frame, you wouldn’t notice that it was narrower than the others. I persuaded William to leave this shade in place only by promising that I was going to install drapes that would cover the space along that side. It was so easy for me to see this as a slight miscalculation with minimal consequences. William confiscated the order form for the shade so he would be able to purchase a new one for us if we had a moment’s hesitation about this one.
William’s error was specific and minor, easily forgiven and forgotten. Not so when the situation was reversed and I made a mistake just a day or two later. I’m not talking about pouring warm decaf hazelnut coffee all over myself by tipping the cup toward my lips before I secured the lid. That made a thorough mess, but no one seemed to notice, and I was reading a new book on Buddhism at the time, so I thought of it as my first test.
No, the mistake I’m talking about was more "public, like a frog." Even telling it elicits waves of recrimination! I phoned the oil delivery and heating company where we have a service contract to report that one of our heating zones wasn’t working. Some variation of this has happened enough times over the years that they know my name and address well. I think they dread my calls. Well, I dread having to call, maybe even more! In the conversation about the current issue, I got into a little tussle with the service manager about when they provide yearly maintenance and whether “bleeding” the radiators is covered in our policy. My point was about preventive maintenance versus servicing our furnace in the middle of the night on a weekend because the filters were clogged causing the temperature to plunge to below fifty degrees when we were away for a few days. Enough said. We agreed that the situation on this particular morning was not urgent and could wait until the next day. Several hours later I received a call that they could come immediately because of a cancellation. Great!
The two service men checked the furnace and found nothing obviously wrong. One of them came to the door and asked to see the thermostat from the non-operative zone. Ugh! He switched it on and the furnace began to purr immediately. My mistake! I had changed the battery recently, and in the process of prying the cover off and snapping it back on, I must have switched the lever to the “Off” position.
I’m still not over this mistake! In fact, I doubt if I will ever call this company again for service. We will either have to change service companies, wait until spring to get warm, or it’s going to be my husband’s turn to call from now until the end of time. Why is it one of my most dreaded occasions to make a call for help only to find that I don’t need it? Like taking a feverish child to the doctor, and by the time you get there, the child is jolly and cool.
Stepping back in perspective, even this mistake is simple, specific, and minor, though definitely embarrassing. Oh, but what about those serious errors in judgment years ago that potentially could have derailed a life or two? Learning to forgive myself is apparently one of the essential principles of Buddhism, but I was raised Roman Catholic. Mortal sins, I was taught, leave a dark smudge on your soul. How did I accept this belief so firmly and lose sight of forgiveness along with everything else about this brand of faith?
No, about these personal failures, I have not yet forgiven myself. I am horrified to look back and see the smudges still there, turbulent with emotion. Regret doesn’t cut it, and divine intervention isn’t currently available. William came to me and said, "I messed up." It was so easy to let it go, a feather drifting through my consciousness. When it comes to my own mistakes, I’ve got the whole live albatross struggling in my arms.
For Your Writing:
Achieving compassion and forgiveness can be a major accomplishment involving months or years of reflection and personal growth. Focus first on times when you have forgiven someone else for "mistakes" both big and small. Stay with this for awhile, starting with the easy forgiveness occasions and working up to some that were more difficult for you. Is it easier for you to forgive a stranger or acquaintance than to forgive someone close to you? If you feel open to more heavy lifting on this topic, reflect on several small, recent mistakes or accidents of your own. Can you achieve compassion and clear your conscience on these? Early adulthood is a fruitful time for making mistakes that matter. If you are looking back on your twenties or thirties, perhaps you may have one or more of these complex behaviors to write about. Forgiveness is a lifelong process.
Quotation for Percolation:
"Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings."
Jack Kornfield (peacequotes@livingcompassion.org)
William (not his real name) is a completely reliable craftsman who has done a lot of work for us over the past several years. Being nearly incompetent ourselves when it comes to repairing, painting, electrical work, tile, and almost anything else around the house, we have been so pleased to have someone who is careful and competent to take care of these things for us. William is easy to be around, always returns phone calls, and seems to take care of our little jobs as if they were in his own home.
I followed William to the kitchen where we looked at the situation together. When my husband and I decided to purchase twelve double-cell blinds to insulate our windows, we first asked William if he had the time to measure the windows and install the blinds for us. If he didn’t have time, we might not have undertaken the project at all. I created a spreadsheet of the windows with a name for each one and William measured them all and wrote the measurements in large legible numerals on the list.
"I think I wrote the wrong number on the sheet," said William. "This blind is one inch too narrow." William had not yet put the shade into the bracket he had just installed within the window frame next to the stove.
"Let’s see how it looks when you put it up," I suggested, postponing any conclusions until we could see the full effect of the discrepancy. What was going through my mind at that moment? I tested myself to see if I was thinking that I should have measured the windows myself. Nope, I wasn’t thinking that. Was I thinking that if William made the mistake, he should pay to fix it? No, even though he offered to do so immediately, I wasn’t thinking that I could let him do that. Was I angry or upset? No, I was calm and sure that the situation wouldn’t be bad, and if it was bad, it would be fixed easily.
When it was installed, sure enough, the shade was an inch too narrow, but it still covered all the glass of the window, and if you didn’t know to look right at that gap between the shade and the window frame, you wouldn’t notice that it was narrower than the others. I persuaded William to leave this shade in place only by promising that I was going to install drapes that would cover the space along that side. It was so easy for me to see this as a slight miscalculation with minimal consequences. William confiscated the order form for the shade so he would be able to purchase a new one for us if we had a moment’s hesitation about this one.
William’s error was specific and minor, easily forgiven and forgotten. Not so when the situation was reversed and I made a mistake just a day or two later. I’m not talking about pouring warm decaf hazelnut coffee all over myself by tipping the cup toward my lips before I secured the lid. That made a thorough mess, but no one seemed to notice, and I was reading a new book on Buddhism at the time, so I thought of it as my first test.
No, the mistake I’m talking about was more "public, like a frog." Even telling it elicits waves of recrimination! I phoned the oil delivery and heating company where we have a service contract to report that one of our heating zones wasn’t working. Some variation of this has happened enough times over the years that they know my name and address well. I think they dread my calls. Well, I dread having to call, maybe even more! In the conversation about the current issue, I got into a little tussle with the service manager about when they provide yearly maintenance and whether “bleeding” the radiators is covered in our policy. My point was about preventive maintenance versus servicing our furnace in the middle of the night on a weekend because the filters were clogged causing the temperature to plunge to below fifty degrees when we were away for a few days. Enough said. We agreed that the situation on this particular morning was not urgent and could wait until the next day. Several hours later I received a call that they could come immediately because of a cancellation. Great!
The two service men checked the furnace and found nothing obviously wrong. One of them came to the door and asked to see the thermostat from the non-operative zone. Ugh! He switched it on and the furnace began to purr immediately. My mistake! I had changed the battery recently, and in the process of prying the cover off and snapping it back on, I must have switched the lever to the “Off” position.
I’m still not over this mistake! In fact, I doubt if I will ever call this company again for service. We will either have to change service companies, wait until spring to get warm, or it’s going to be my husband’s turn to call from now until the end of time. Why is it one of my most dreaded occasions to make a call for help only to find that I don’t need it? Like taking a feverish child to the doctor, and by the time you get there, the child is jolly and cool.
Stepping back in perspective, even this mistake is simple, specific, and minor, though definitely embarrassing. Oh, but what about those serious errors in judgment years ago that potentially could have derailed a life or two? Learning to forgive myself is apparently one of the essential principles of Buddhism, but I was raised Roman Catholic. Mortal sins, I was taught, leave a dark smudge on your soul. How did I accept this belief so firmly and lose sight of forgiveness along with everything else about this brand of faith?
No, about these personal failures, I have not yet forgiven myself. I am horrified to look back and see the smudges still there, turbulent with emotion. Regret doesn’t cut it, and divine intervention isn’t currently available. William came to me and said, "I messed up." It was so easy to let it go, a feather drifting through my consciousness. When it comes to my own mistakes, I’ve got the whole live albatross struggling in my arms.
For Your Writing:
Achieving compassion and forgiveness can be a major accomplishment involving months or years of reflection and personal growth. Focus first on times when you have forgiven someone else for "mistakes" both big and small. Stay with this for awhile, starting with the easy forgiveness occasions and working up to some that were more difficult for you. Is it easier for you to forgive a stranger or acquaintance than to forgive someone close to you? If you feel open to more heavy lifting on this topic, reflect on several small, recent mistakes or accidents of your own. Can you achieve compassion and clear your conscience on these? Early adulthood is a fruitful time for making mistakes that matter. If you are looking back on your twenties or thirties, perhaps you may have one or more of these complex behaviors to write about. Forgiveness is a lifelong process.
Quotation for Percolation:
"Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings."
Jack Kornfield (peacequotes@livingcompassion.org)
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