Sparrow

“Maybe your lot right now could be improved. I know mine could. And working to make things better is great. But we don’t just work to make things better and leave it at that, do we? We live in the idealized world inside our heads. And that keeps us from ever really enjoying what we have right now, from enjoying the work that we’re doing to create our better tomorrow. It’s as if we’re afraid to really commit to this moment because a better one might come along later. This approach is totally ridiculous and completely absurd.*”
― Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality

“The lack of fulfillment we feel is natural and normal. That's true enlightenment. It's when we feel fulfilled that we're deluded.

By doing zazen practice, we gradually begin to loosen our grip on the idea that we ought to be fulfilled. We begin to see that our normal condition of feeling that something is missing in our lives is not really such a terrible thing. It's just a feeling. No more and no less. We no longer desperately seek to shove something into that void. We can just let it be just as it is and accept that it's all right...

If we can accept this lack of fulfillment as our natural condition, we can be totally free. We can accept good and bad equally. We can accept loneliness, and we can accept love. We no longer feel that things ought to be different from how they actually are. At the same time we do not complacently accept things that actually do need to be changed. We can understand that it is often our duty to change a situation.”
― Brad Warner, Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything In Between

“Be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf—seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life. Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.”
― George Saunders, Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness

“Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.”
― Brad Warner, Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye