The wise can change their mind.

The stubborn, never.

~Immanuel Kant

when needs bloom…

inquiry for today~ how is it today?

when you look again

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future,

we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance.

The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty,

and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die.

If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future,

we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where,

despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe

whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict

between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is,

protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life.

Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure.

To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,”

but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I”

which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get,

the more I shall want. 

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security

and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.

To hold your breath is to lose your breath.

A society based on the quest for security is nothing

but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum

and as purple as a beet.

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it.

To understand it, you must not face it but be it.

~Alan Watts