May 7
The mind of the sage is like a mirror: it holds on to nothing and refuses nothing, receives things as they come, and keeps no trace.
The True Book of the Welling Primal Source (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The mind of the sage is like a mirror: it holds on to nothing and refuses nothing, receives things as they come, and keeps no trace.
If you have been unfair to someone, you may wish they would meet you the next day without reservation. No cautious tone, no distance that first has to shrink again. Your bad moment should have left no imprint on them.
With a sentence you have thought over for a long time, or a gift that mattered to you, you wish for the opposite. It should stay. Someone should remember it later and perhaps pass some of it on.
So the same capacity appears to you once as generosity and once as indifference, depending on what you yourself put into it. With you it is hardly different. Not holding on to a hurt may come more easily to you since you have generally been keeping things for less long. Whether that is composure or a kind of tiredness is hard to tell apart from the inside.
Perhaps the difference lies less in the forgetting than in the moment just before it: whether something has fully reached you before it passes.
Someone who meets you without constraint after the quarrel will not keep your gift any differently either. Yet they may still have heard you exactly.
