Your ability to find peace in your heart was not put there for the times things go right.
From A Pocket Guide to Being Human, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The man who feeds the jays was late today, and when he came he sat on the bench without the bag. His wife is sick, Switch says, though Switch hears most things secondhand and improves them. He sat there forty minutes in the cold and his face was not unhappy, which I did not expect and could not stop looking at. For years I thought calm was something you earned on good days and spent on good days, a kind of fair weather built into a person, and I had the order of it backward: your ability to find peace in your heart was not put there for the times things go right. Those times do not need it. I do not know whether he found it or whether it simply came and sat down next to him, and I have no way to ask a man that.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- When you no longer need to be right, you more often will be.
- Ideas grow best in the space between two minds.
- Kindness works well with strangers, but even better with those close to you who have ceased to expect it.
- Humility makes you grateful and gratitude makes you kind.
- The true gift leaves no trace on the hand of the giver.
- You will walk more confidently if you watch the road than if you watch your feet.