Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you’ve ever been given is yours forever.
Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.
Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.
Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.
If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.
Inner peace is more a question of cultivating perspective, meaning, and wisdom even as life touches you with its pain.
Life wastes nothing. Over and over again every molecule that has ever been is gathered up by the hand of life to be reshaped into yet another form.p 259
We burn out not because we don’t care but because we don’t grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.
When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.
Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.
Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. (in Bill Moyers’ Healing and the Mind)
Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.