Unassuming Gets You Nothing

Funny title, ha ha! I mean it's not like we are living on a giant ball of rock and iron somewhere in the middle of outer space (metaphorically middle, have no clue if we are middle, edge or somewhere in-between) -- no reason to ever take a step back and ponder a bit. 

I'm always open to enlightenment. There are always lessons in someone else's perspective. There's always someone who has jacked things up well before you -- and that's a thousand dollars right there if you can glean the lesson from the jacker before you do the jacking. Don't get me wrong, there are bad enlighteners, but that's inherently enlightenment. It's iterative. But then you get the unassuming label and you lose the thousand dollars you just gained a few sentences back. That's also iterative.  

Equanimity? Or, Mental Immobility By Free Association Overdrive?

A Robert Pirsig quote from an interview with him:

"A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable. I better get scholarly here. There are two dharmas. There is the written dharma which is all the laws and rules - and there are a lot of them - but Zen emphasises the unwritten dharma and to know that you have to forget the rule book. People naturally feel that Zen ritual is bullshit, and I remember Suzuki saying: Yeah, I know, but it's true anyway." 

Yeah, I know, but it's true anyway. I ❤️that. I'm not scholarly but if you meagerly poke around the internet you'll cross up Suzuki with Greatly Clumsy. I ❤️that too. If each of us can be a small but not insignificant conduit to success to everyone else around us, then we got a mesh and we can scale this thing up. You gotta be a shining light because you never know who's going to riff off of your brightness, however non-bright that may feel. 

As for great humility, how else is there to live? The more you suffer and/or the more you see others suffer -- the more you travel the road, the more you endure, it's just a plump bushel of perspective and there's a lot out there to consider. And, arrogance! Arrogance is just blindness to opportunity (someone should quote that). The moment cannot be more enjoyed by the 100-millionaire as it can be by the proletariat (or someone being tortured if s/he can dig really deep). We've veni vidi vici'd ourselves until all the cows came home (and went back), but how many moments just flit by and what's the cost?

(ed. note: It's been a long week and I've been editing-before-writing way too much: it's a disease! I feel like I am writing 3 or 4 posts in my head at once and it's just killing progress. So apologies for the delay, but my rekindled journal is not dead, back on the horse and ride.)