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The Tao of Death

Oprah: What about death? What happens when we die, do you believe?

Thich Nhat Hanh: The question can be answered when you can answer this: What happens in the present moment? In the present moment, you are producing thought, speech, and action. And they continue in the world. Every thought you produce, anything you say, any action you do, it bears your signature. Action is called karma. And that’s your continuation. When this body disintegrates, you continue on with your actions. It’s like the cloud in the sky. When the cloud is no longer in the sky, it hasn’t died. The cloud is continued in other forms like rain or snow or ice. Our nature is the nature of no birth and no death. It is impossible for a cloud to pass from being into nonbeing. And that is true with a beloved person. They have not died. They have continued in many new forms and you can look deeply and recognize them in you and around you.
Source: Oprah.com 
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On Finding Something Worth Living For

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.


You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.


You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.


Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967
Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work: Umair Haque’s amazing HBR article on creating meaningful life through meaningful work. Does your work: stand the test of time? test of excellence? the test of you?
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. ~ Unknown

What man actually needs is not a tension less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. ~ Viktor Frankl

“I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and leads the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” ~ Thoreau

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The Tao of Relationships

“I dig pits to trap others and fall in. I should be suspicious of what I want.” ~ Jelaluddin Rumi

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create.” ~ John Lennon