## Metadata - Author: [[Norman Fischer]] - Full Title: Sailing Home - Category: #books ## Highlights - let go of the story and pay attention to the actual facts of your life. When you pay attention to these facts, the Buddha felt, without being swept away by the exciting plotline of your story, you will be able to see what kinds of thoughts and deeds lead to suffering and trouble, and what kinds of thoughts and deeds lead to happiness. Seeing clearly, you will choose what’s happy over what’s not happy, and your life and the lives of those around you will improve. ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=294)) - Most of what makes a life satisfying and resonant lies outside the sphere of our personal skills and powers. ([Location 406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=406)) - To respect the sea is to trust that we can welcome life’s immense and unknowable currents rather than resist them, even when they seem to be drawing us to shores we don’t want to visit. We live our lives too much on small islands of conscious awareness and control. ([Location 408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=408)) - “How is it with you these days? What is uppermost in your heart?” ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=715)) - The false tales of our heroes encourage us toward our own achievements by giving us some faith in human possibility. However false our own stories may be, when we share them we find the companionship and encouragement we need for our journey. False stories are our main means of communication, of sharing our lives, even if we are never quite sharing them truthfully, or fully, enough. If we waited for the real truth and the real intimacy, we’d be waiting a long time. There are people who insist on true stories, and wait possibly a lifetime for them, a lifetime in which nothing at all happens. ([Location 804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=804)) - In the Abhidharma, the Buddhist psychological teachings, the body is called “the soil in which understanding grows.” ([Location 1132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=1132)) - A monk once asked Zen Master Zhaozho what meditation is. “It’s nonmeditation,” he answered. “How can meditation be nonmeditation?” the monk said. “It’s alive!” was Zhaozho’s response. ([Location 1211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=1211)) - They are afraid of engaging their lives fully without holding back because they are afraid that if they don’t hold something in reserve they might end up with nothing. ([Location 2844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AIRBSU&location=2844))