January 20
Measure is best. Do not covet what your lot denies you — and you will never lack what you truly need.
Sayings of the Seven Sages (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Measure is best. Do not covet what your lot denies you — and you will never lack what you truly need.
Giving up a wish always looks the same from the outside. You stop looking for flats in another city, or you set aside the application you have been rewriting for months. Whether you are acknowledging a limit or have simply grown tired is hard to tell at that moment. At first, both feel like relief.
What you really need isn't settled in advance either. You tend to find it out afterwards, from what happens once you have done without. Sometimes, after a while, you notice that you are missing very little. The wish had mainly been holding in a restlessness that now spreads out elsewhere. Sometimes it comes back in a different shape, as irritation over things that have nothing to do with it, say, or as a strikingly precise knowledge of how others have fared in that city.
Only in the first case was the renunciation wise. But when you made the decision, you knew neither outcome.
With some things you will never quite know. The application is still in a folder, and you open it rarely, but not never.
