perspective

The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is
whether you are cursing your bruised knee or admiring the view.

Through working in harmony with life's circumstances, Taoist understanding changes what others may percieve as negative into something positive.

Truth is perspective; absolute truth is ego.

"All the gold in the world cannot buy a dying man one more breath---so what does that make today worth?"

Although there is a universal reality and a universal truth, individual reality and individual truth are merely manipulations you create for yourself out of the data that you choose. True, the data that flows towards any individual is incomplete and each individual builds their reality and truth frameworks from that incomplete data.

I believe that its not what happens to you or for you that makes you grateful, it's how you respond to what is happening, that shows your belief about gratitude.

What I need is perspective... Perspective is necessay.  Otherwise there are only two dimensions.  Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face.

"But when the conquered spirit breaks free
And indicates a new light
Who'll take care of the cats?"

Ultimately, love is only possible for humans insofar as they can achieve some comprehension of their place and their duties and their values and their significance within the whole of life, of society, of spirituality, of history, of nature. In all merely partial or fragmentary perspectives, there necessarily remain undigested irrational factors, surds that one is merely tolerating and not truly respecting as essential and integral to the whole of what we are.

It is sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.