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4d • Inspiration Corner
Eleven years later. Same heart, different hands.
Hi Everyone 👋
Please take a few minutes to relax and read through this post, as it means so much to me, and I hope it will for you too ❤️
I wrote the first version of this post in 2015. I was younger then. Not in years, maybe...but in how I thought change worked. I believed if I just loved hard enough, wrote clear enough, stood firm enough, the world would tilt toward peace.
It hasn’t..... Not yet.
Some days it feels like we’ve gone backwards.
But here’s what eleven more years of Buddhism and Daoism have taught me….The goal was never to fix the world. The goal is to keep showing up inside it without closing my heart.
I still run a blog in the format of Skool.
I still try to live compassionately, in how I speak,
how I spend my money,
how I fail and try again.
But I no longer pretend it’s easy.
The negative comments still come.
Sometimes crueller than before.
The world is louder now.
Meaner in some corners.
And I have days where I want to shut it all down and walk into the woods and never read another argument about things that should be simple, like feeding the hungry, or not bombing children.
But I don’t shut down.
Not because I’m strong.
Because I’ve learned something from sitting still.
Anger is not my enemy.
Burnout is.
So I practice wu wei, not laziness, but knowing when to push and when to let the river carry what it will.
I practice metta, starting with myself, because you can’t pour from a cracked bowl.
The wars haven’t stopped.
Poverty hasn’t ended.
The environment is bleeding faster.
And yet.
And yet, I see more people waking up than I did in 2015.
Young people who refuse to accept this as normal.Communities sharing food, not just recipes.
Strangers on the internet choosing kindness in the middle of a flame war....
That’s not nothing.
That’s the dharma moving through sneakers and hashtags and tired parents posting at 2am.
So here’s what I actually believe now, not what sounds hopeful, but what keeps me getting up...
We may not see peace in our lifetime.
But every small refusal to add to the suffering matters.
Every time I choose to breathe before I reply to hatred, that’s a victory nobody claps for but the ancestors.
Every time one of you leaves a kind comment on a hard day, you don’t just help me , you help whoever else reads it and remembers they’re not alone.
I don’t need to save the world anymore.
I just need to stay human in it.
And that means being honest…
I’m tired too.
I doubt too.
I snap at people I love too.
But then I come back to the cushion, or the garden, or the page, and I remember.....
The river doesn't rush to reach the sea.
It just keeps flowing.
So I’m still here.
Still writing.
Still failing.
Still forgiving myself.
Still believing, not in a perfect world, but in a kinder one.
One meal.
One post.
One deep breath at a time.
If any of this lands for you, if you’re tired too,
or angry,
or hopeful against your better judgment, I’d really love to hear from you.
Tell me what keeps you going when the news is unbearable.
Or what you’ve stopped believing in.
Or what you’ve started believing instead.
With Love ❤️
Always
Mark
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Eleven years later. Same heart, different hands.
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