Zen And The Art Of Sailing Through Life
Navigating the world with effortless ease.
There are two ways to live your life — you can row your boat or your can put up a sail. If you choose to row your boat, you will be steering all the time. You will be involved all the time — constantly adjusting course and battling against all the other forces at play. But if you choose to sail, you will set up the sails and let the wind do the work for you. You only need to be involved in correcting course when necessary and you need not be steering constantly.
Life is most skillfully lived when one sails a boat rather than rowing it. It’s more intelligent to sail than to row.
For those who choose to sail, we must spend a good deal of time accurately defining our destination. All crew members should have a good understanding of where we are headed, so that every little action they take moves the ship in the right direction. The old adage applies well here: if you have seven hours to cut a tree, then spend six hours sharpening the axe.
To be very clear about where you want to get to, you need to know where you are coming from. The momentum you already have will define the direction in which you will go — and if you want to change that direction, you will have to work with the momentum and not against it.
And the momentum of history would imply that there certain outcomes are more likely than others. So while anything is possible, certain things are more probable. In the field of possibilities, there are parameters and boundaries that define the way in which the possibilities unfold. The more accurate our understanding of these parameters and boundaries, the better we’ll be able to anticipate the unfolding of life, the more likely we are to define a viable destination and the more likely we are to reach this destination.
It is better to start off by understanding the world as it is, than to impose our own ideals on the world. You might wish the world was a certain way and set expectations based on these wishes. But the world won’t align with that. If you understand the world as it is, even if you don’t accept it, you can then set expectations that are actually grounded in reality.
