On Emotions
Emotions aren’t something to control—they’re a part of you, quietly reminding you where it hurts. Learning to befriend them is where real growth begins.
Essays on emotion, faith and awareness, and Camus.
Emotions aren’t something to control—they’re a part of you, quietly reminding you where it hurts. Learning to befriend them is where real growth begins.
Spirituality isn’t about sides — it’s about direction. Through faith or awareness, belief or observation, we’re all moving toward the same quiet coherence of love and truth.
On Camus’s The Stranger: a man who will not tell the story society needs, and the freedom he finds in refusing.
Each passage is kept with its source, a rendering where provided, and a reading note.
應無所住而生其心
The Diamond Sutra §10 · tr. Kumārajīva
Let the mind arise, dwelling on nothing.
One should act without being attached to fixed identities, expectations, or outcomes. For me, this is about learning to act without constantly needing external confirmation. Nonattachment shouldn’t mean passivity; it means taking action without letting the outcome define the person taking it.
為道日損,損之又損,以至於無為。
The Daodejing Chapter 48
Following the way, each day something is let go — let go, and let go again, until nothing is forced.
The pursuit of understanding isn’t always about accumulating more knowledge, methods, or rules. Sometimes it means removing unnecessary interference. I’ve become increasingly interested in the difference between acting with intention and forcing things to happen.
依乎天理……因其固然。
Zhuangzi Cook Ding carves an ox · 庖丁解牛
I go along the natural grain … following what is already so.
Cook Ding works with the natural structure of the ox rather than forcing his blade through it. I relate this to learning to recognize the structure of things instead of imposing my will on everything. This applies to art, trading, practice, and life: understanding a structure intellectually is different from developing the sensitivity to act within it.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
The Gospels Mark 8:36 · King James Version
I don’t interpret this as a rejection of money or worldly achievement. It asks whether external success is worth pursuing if the process costs you your sense of self. I’m interested in building a life in the real world without allowing the world’s measures of success to become my only measures of value.
ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ
The Greeks Plato, Apology 38a · tr. Jowett
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Reflection should serve life, not replace it. I want to understand why I believe what I believe, distinguish my own judgment from inherited assumptions, and then put that understanding into practice. The point of examining life is ultimately to live it more deliberately.
Chinese passages are set vertically; English renderings and reading notes accompany the sources.