Perhaps the most exasperating thing about “me,” about nature and the universe, is that it will never “stay put.” It is like a beautiful woman who wil… - Alan Watts

For the perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness.

The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, the more joyless and frustrated life becomes. So protected from life, man becomes a sort of mollusc encrusted in a hard shell of “tradition,” so that when at last reality breaks through, as it must, the tide of pent-up fear runs wild.

Life & love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.

"If, on the other hand, you are aware of fear, you realize that, because this feeling is now yourself, escape is impossible. You see that calling it "fear" tells you little or nothing about it, for the comparison and the naming is based, not on past experience, but on memory. You have then no choice but to be aware of it with your whole being as an entirely new experience. Indeed, every experience is in this sense new, and at every moment of our lives we are in the midst of the new and the unknown. At this point you receive the experience without resisting it or naming it, and the whole sense of conflict between "I" and the present reality vanishes. For most of us this conflict is ever gnawing within us because our lives are one long effort to resist the unknown, the real present in which we live, which is the unknown in the midst of coming into being."