Tag: dailysuccesshabits
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what a girl in a bonnet can hear
As a little girl I often wore a bonnet. When I first saw this picture of my big sister and me in an old photo album, I assumed a bonnet was what all little girls wore. But it wasn’t. I wore it because I was sickly, prone to perpetual colds, coughs, sore throats, and ear…
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Good neighbors
As the world knows, Zen Buddhism is a practice of stillness and silence. Its iconic image is a figure sitting cross-legged in meditation. But Zen is also a practice of active questioning. And no question is more central to the practice than one a child might ask: “What is this?” Zen teachings enjoin practitioners to…
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if not now
There is a long-held view that at this time of year we should take stock of where we are and where we’re headed. I subscribe to that. It’s a good time to renew our intentions and redirect our actions. In Buddhism, “intention” refers to that part of the Eightfold Path which is called “right intention.”…
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I should have thought
Many years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I traveled from eastern Iowa to the North of England to study English literature at the University of Leeds, a so-called “redbrick” university in West Yorkshire. There I lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot-laden city in a hall of…
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what I’m working on
For my birthday my daughter gave me this monogrammed notebook. It fits in my hand. She inscribed it, “Take this with you everywhere. Use it for everything.” A few days ago I picked it up and put a pen to the pages. This is what I wrote. People ask me what I’m working on now.…
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A peaceable heart
Like the word silly, which once meant “innocent” (“the silly sheep”) but now means “foolish, frivolous, lacking in common sense,” the word contention has a distinctive history. Derived from the Latin contentio, it once meant “striving, struggle, competition.” But sometime in the sixteenth century, contention came to mean “disagreement, argument, fighting.” Unlike silly, contention has…