I’m a little bit of a plot junkie. I like stakes in my books. Sometimes storytelling gets a bit of a bad rap. “Plot’s easy” or “there’s a higher art we are all aspiring to.” Yes, first and foremost we are all aspiring to that art but I also think it has to have a certain propulsiveness, a certain thing that’s keeping me turning the pages. No matter how great the voice is you will have problems in the plot that will enable somebody to put it down. There are too many things competing for everyone’s attention to allow anyone to put that book down. I don’t want the reviewer to put it down because they’ve got 50 galleys stacked up. I don’t want the reader to put it down.
But often it is a seemingly irresolvable relationship that teaches us the most, once we're willing to be vulnerable and honest, once we're willing to connect with what Chogyam Trungpa called "the genuine heart of sadness." As warriors in training we do our best to hold the person in our heart without any hypocrisy. One thing we can do with a difficult relationship is to place a picture of the person somewhere we will see it often and think, "I wish for your deepest well-being". Or we can write down the person's name, along with the aspiration that they may be safe, may be happy, may live in peace. Regardless of what specific action we take, our aspiration is to benefit the other person and wish them well.
If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter, we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good. I long to make this word echo differently in hearts and ears—not less complicated, but differently so. Love as muscular, resilient. Love as social—not just about how we are intimately, but how we are together, in public. I want to aspire to a carnal practical love—eros become civic, not sexual and yet passionate, full-bodied. Because it is the best of which we are capable, loving is also supremely exacting, not always but again and again. Love is something we only master in moments.
“One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.”
“As a way to build relationships, trust and credibility with customers, if you talk about problems and how to solve them as opposed to products and what they can do, people are a lot more attentive to that. The best thing you can hope to aspire to in test and measurement when you are in the trenches enabling other people to succeed, is to be a trusted advisor.”
“He really had to think about it. He isn't an actor; he doesn't aspire for fame; he doesn't want a career in Hollywood. It was just a great opportunity, all the life experiences. All the stuff he's done in Paris, the private yachts and staying in a castle. Plus it's a good time for him to settle down.”
“The love talked and written about so much in novels, poetry and magazines, the love of one's neighbour, the universal love of the churches, love of humanity, has nothing whatsoever to do with 'loveless love', which is a harsh discipline, cold as ice, as cutting as a sword, and which aspires to overcome the human condition in order to reach the Kingdom of the Immortals.”
O MAN! Offer Thy labyrinthine longings into a monotheistic bonfire consecrated to the unparalleled God.Burn desire for human affection in the fire of aspiration for GOD alone, a love solitary because omnipresent!Throw faggot of ignorance to incandesce the blaze of insight! Devour all sorrows in the sorrow for God's absence. Consume all regrets in meditative bliss!
Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.
The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.