“be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart... fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds, and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, ‘I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.’ Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail. To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn — that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice… So, every day, exercise your heart by taking in life’s little pains and joys — that kind of exercise will make your heart supple, the way a runner makes a muscle supple, so that when it breaks, (and it surely will,) it will break not into a fragment grenade, but into a greater capacity for love.” Parker Palmer’s Naropa University Commencement Address via his latest book “On The Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Growing Old” (pg.44-50)
