July 23rd ~ If you walk down the road, you will see the splendor of nature, the extraordinary beauty of the green fields and the open skies; and you will hear the laughter of children. But in spite of all that, there is a sense of sorrow. There is the anguish of a woman bearing a child; there is sorrow in death; there is sorrow when you are looking forward to something, and it does not happen; there is sorrow when a nation runs down, goes to seed; and there is the sorrow of corruption, not only in the collective, but also in the individual. There is sorrow in your own house, if you look deeply–the sorrow of not being able to fulfill, the sorrow of your own pettiness or incapacity, and various unconscious sorrows.
There is also laughter in life. Laughter is a lovely thing–to laugh without reason, to have joy in one’s heart without cause, to love without seeking anything in return. But such laughter rarely happens to us. We are burdened with sorrow, our life is a process of misery and strife, a continuous disintegration, and we almost never know what it is to love with our whole being. . . .
We want to find a solution, a means, a method by which to resolve this burden of life, and so we never actually look at sorrow. We try to escape through myths, through images, through speculation; we hope to find some way to avoid this weight, to stay ahead of the wave of sorrow.
. . . .Sorrow has an ending, but it does not come about through any system or method. There is no sorrow when there is perception of what is.
December 16th, 2019 ~ I feel this sorrow. Selling is something I have done from time to time. It was one of my first jobs. This has included several stints with our own family businesses. I always enjoyed getting sales. There was this immediate satisfaction involved. However, I often felt a sadness after it. Sometimes it involved my behavior, when I was so eager to get the sale. Looking back, I would hook clients. But really, there was sadness because getting a sale wasn’t going to make everything okay. I still had problems and getting a sale couldn’t fix it. It still happens when something good happens. It acts as a reminder that it is just a sale. Challenging things will eventually happen that I will have to handle.