Living fully in the moment

[Aloka]

I was looking at the following quotes by Thich Nhat Hahn and wondered if anyone had any comments/reflections about them.




“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”

“We are all the leaves of one tree. We are all the waves of one sea.”

“We have to learn to live our life as a human being deeply. We need to live each breath deeply so that we have peace, joy and freedom as we breathe.”

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”

https://www.developgoodhabits.com/thich-nhat-hanh-quotes/




:hands:

[Cobalt]

I like the waves one.

I'm actually listening to one of his books right now, as a recording of talks he has given. I like the idea that a wave doesn't have to change to be water; it doesn't have to begin or end any particular way in order to be water. It's already water. Water is all it is.

This appeals to me probably because I'm very fond of thinking of reality as one big block of matter. There are no gaps between my couch and table because air is matter. There's no gap between the couch and my jeans. There is no gap between anything and anything. And yet, matter is also mostly empty space. On an atomic level, there is no little matter to any particular thing that it's almost a rounding error. What differentiates solids from gasses is just the way the atoms are moving at any given time.

So I am a piece of the universe that is temporarily moving in the specific way that allows it to be aware of its place in the block of matter and that that place is in a state of both constant contact and is no less hollow than it was before "life" or will be after.

So I think about the wave thing similarly. A wave may seem to have a detectable beginning and end, but it's not like its beginning changes it into something other than water and its end doesn't make it any more water than it just was.

[philg]

Waves are a good way into this kind of thinking. When a wave moves it gives the impression of being something separate, but of course nothing actually moves apart from a wave of energy. The water merely bobs up and down for a second. Standing waves are interesting too. They give the impression of being permanent, but as soon as the energy stops, the waves disappear. I sometimes meditate on being a wave, looking about at how separate I am, but really understanding that I am merely part of the same ocean as every other wave that thinks it is separate.