“in the process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss,” Rinaldi explains, “I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.” Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later—and later is... See more

At first, the news of impermanence typically generates a great deal of anxiety. In response, we attempt to make things solid and secure. We try our best to arrange the conditions of our lives, to manipulate the circumstances so that we can be happy. I love to lie in bed, particularly on a cold winter morning. The sheets are soft and warm. My body i

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How little we seem to be able to control after all, I thought. We expend our life energy trying to get our children to become what we think they should be, and they turn into something else altogether. We work and work, weekends and evenings, but still feel unappreciated or undone by our own unconscious compulsions. In the words of the Indian mysti

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We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution—any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control. So we snap at our partners, rather t... See more