February 5
Life is like a game of dice: how the dice fall is not up to me. But to place the fallen ones carefully and skilfully — that is my task.
Discourses II.5 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Life is like a game of dice: how the dice fall is not up to me. But to place the fallen ones carefully and skilfully — that is my task.
The hardest things to sort out are the ones you brought about yourself. A chance event, an illness or someone else's decision can at some point be accepted as given. With a commitment of your own that you regret today, that works less well. It was once your choice. Now it is a situation you find yourself in.
Two attitudes present themselves, and both are somehow askew. You can go on treating the matter as your mistake, going over it again and again and asking where you should have turned off. Then your attention stays with a moment you can no longer reach. Or you declare it fate, something that has simply befallen you. That clears your view, but it feels as though you were talking your way out of something.
Perhaps each is half true. The commitment remains yours, also in the sense that no one but you can now fulfil it well or decently undo it. And yet it is no longer the same decision as it was back then, when you didn't yet know what you know today.
Tomorrow, what you make of it today will also have already happened.
