Thursday, July 5, 2018

Thursday Thoughts...

“My actions are my only true belongings.” 

Thich Nhat Hanh

This one got me pondering back and forth, yet I enjoyed the mental ping pong in my brain for a bit.

At first, I felt he was saying that the only real things you can own are your actions.  When you strip away the possessions and accoutrements and all those things that we accumulate along a lifetime, then what we are left with as a sense of of what we can own - are our actions.

Then I wondered if that could possibly be it - surely we can own our own thoughts as well?

My sense is that as a buddhist monk, you are probably pretty good at not owning possessions - and that the statement is almost an expression of his lived reality. "I own nothing (unlike many of us) so my actions are it".

I think what I take away most from it tho is maybe not about belongings so much as about the real person. If you strip away all the things that surround us - our clothes, our house, our car, our computer, our phones, our televisions. These things tell you something about us; but they don't tell you about the real us.

It is perhaps in our actions, that our true selves can best be glimpsed.


Tokyo, 2016.

6 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. So simple, yet so profound I think B - makes me really think about it...

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  2. Action is the way possibility becomes reality. Even thoughts are just passing clouds until they result in action. I think you are right that we are known by what we do.

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    Replies
    1. Oh I love that phrase action is the way possibility becomes reality - so true, of course! It was an interesting place for me to land and has kept me thinking ever since about my actions...go well.

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