July 18
As a rock is not moved by the storm, so the sage stays firm amid praise and blame. The tamed mind brings happiness — hard to guard, fleeting, yet wholesome once it is mastered.
Dhammapada (freely rendered)
Listening mode
As a rock is not moved by the storm, so the sage stays firm amid praise and blame. The tamed mind brings happiness — hard to guard, fleeting, yet wholesome once it is mastered.
A reproach you sometimes replay in the evening, sentence by sentence, as if repetition could reveal how it was meant. Praise, by contrast, you often keep only as a feeling. It asks nothing of you, so you don't examine it either.
And yet it may change you more. Someone who values you for a particular quality gives you a reason to show it more often. After a while you no longer quite know whether you are patient or whether you have learned where patience gets noticed.
Staying untouched would be no gain, though. When no judgement matters to someone any more, the thing it was about has often stopped mattering too. Something else is harder: to take a judgement seriously without letting it decide who you are. That rarely holds for long. Your attention slips, precisely in the moments when you feel seen.
Perhaps you notice it when, after a kind remark, you pause briefly and wonder what you were actually about to do before it was said.
