Touch
After P read my Year End Notes she immediately told me to read the entry called ‘Touch’ in Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony by Deng Ming-Dao. A very useful addition. Thanks P.
Our lives cannot be sensed whole. We have to feel our way forward. And what we feel, we have to trust.
One of the hardest things is to trust our own feelings. Beginning with well-meaning parents and teachers, we hear so many instructions that thwart and ridicule our perceptions that we eventually internalise this mistrust of our own feelings. Far too many of us have voices of doubt playing continuously in our minds. soon it is hard to feel anything genuine, because these voices are always telling us that we are wrong.
Disappointments and setbacks reinforce these voices. Maybe we start out trying to be extraordinary. “I’ll be great!” we vow, but then we stumble a little, and the voices become louder.
But we have to stick to our perceptions and to our feelings. That is where experience, philosophy, and self-refinement come in: we know that we have accomplished things, we know that we can coordinate what we perceive with established principles, and we trust that our beings are finely tuned enough to accurately feel what is around us. **What we do in life is up to us and will not be known all at once.** Therefore, we have to feel our way along, little by little, building the vision to know what we are individually meant to do. We can’t let doubt interfere with our touch. We have to trust our touch.
//@solle
//London