Quote from Alan Watts

good quote from Alan Watts

I have been working for years to find ways of showing that we don't confront the world as isolated subjects confronting alien objects. What we experience is always ourselves, and this is a more or less intelligent "happening" which is neither voluntary nor involuntary, subjective nor objective, controlled nor uncontrolled. Methods of meditation are effective only insofar as, through failure of dogged persistences, the show that the ego and its willing are unreal. There ought to be a less clumsy way of seeing the point but I have only been partially successful in finding it. Krishnamurti has the same difficulty and has been working along the same line.

How to Be Old

Poem: "How to Be Old" by May Swenson, from Nature: Poems Old and New. © Mariner Books, 2000.

How to Be Old

It is easy to be young, (Everybody is,
at first.) It is not easy
to be old. It takes time.
Youth is given; age is achieved.
One must work a magic to mix with time
in order to become old.

Youth is given. One must put it away
like a doll in a closet,
take it out and play with it only
on holidays. One must have many dresses
and dress the doll impeccably
(but not to show the doll, to keep it hidden.)

It is necessary to adore the doll,
to remember it in the dark on the ordinary
days, and every day congratulate
one's aging face in the mirror.

In time one will be very old.
In time, one's life will be accomplished.
And in time, in time, the doll––
like new, though ancient––will be found.