Simple Truths by Kent Nerburn
Clear and gentle guidance on the big issues in life
Simple Truths was a nice short read with concise advice and aphorisms on education and learning, work, money, possessions, giving, travel, loneliness and solitude, love, and marriage. I enjoyed the mystic-ness of the book.
Highlights
Psychological relationship to money: One measures money against desires, the other measures it against needs.
Stay away from debt in your personal life. You have committed your life to making money to pay for your past.
Money tends to move away from those who try to hoard it, those who share it.
Money comes and goes. You must not be immobilized by the fear of losing it.
We need to find a true measure for our possessions so we can free ourselves from their weight without denying them their potential for good.
We must always remember that possessions have no inherent value. They become what we make them.
Two people, who moments before lived in separate worlds of private concerns, suddenly meet each other over a simple act of sharing.
Once you become a giver you will never be alone.
Travel doesn't have to be to some dreamlike and foreign destination. It can take you on an evening stroll through a distant forest or to a park bench in a town a hundred miles from your home. What matters is that you have left the comfort of the familiar and opened yourself to a world that is totally apart from your own. Many people don't want to be travelers. They would rather be tourists, flitting over the surface of other people's lives while never really leaving their own.
Beneath our differences of language and culture we all share the same dream of loving and being loved, of having a life with more joy than sorrow.
Time spent alone returns to you a hundredfold, because it is the proving ground of the spirit. You quickly find out if you are at peace with yourself, or if the meaning of your life is found only in the superficial affairs of the day.
Solitude is a condition of peace that stands in direct opposition to loneliness. Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union.
The awareness we experience in solitude is priceless for the peace it can give. It is also the key to true loving in our relationships. When we have a part of ourselves that is firm, confident, and alone, we don't need another person to fill us.
How you deal with love is how love will deal with you, and all our hearts feel the same pains and joys, even if lives and ways are very different.
Truly fortunate partners manage to become longtime friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other's laughs, passions, sadnesses, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept up into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.
If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can't accept, you will inevitably come to grief. If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.
A child will hold a mirror to your life, and you will find your emptiness visited in some unimagined form upon the child itself.
True strength does not require an adversary and does not see itself as noble or heroic. It simply does what it must without praise or need of recognition. A person who can quietly stay at home and care for an ailing parent is as strong as a person who can climb a mountain. A person who can stand up for a principle is as strong as a person who can fend off an army. They simply have quieter, less dramatic, kinds of strength.
How you respond to tragedy and suffering is one true measure of your strength. You need to see those moments as moments of growth. You need to look upon them as gifts to help you reclaim what is important in your life.
Spiritual understanding never becomes deep unless you subject yourself to the spiritual discipline of practicing your belief.
Do not refuse to seek God because you cannot find the one truth. We live in a pluralistic world, and only the most hard-headed refuse to accept the fact that truth — whether spiritual, cultural, political, or otherwise — is given to different people in different ways.
True caring and respect serve the weakness, but mirror only the humanity and the strength. Caring and respect listen, laugh, and even challenge.
We do death no justice by measuring it against ourselves. We are too small; it is too great. So, fear dying if you must. It takes us from the only life we know, and that is a worthy loss to mourn. But do not fear death.
If we have played our part well where it — offering love where it was needed, strength and caring where it was lacking; if we have tended the earth and its creatures with a sense of humble stewardship — we will have done enough.