they want me gone, in hopes that it will make their own lives
easier. How could anyone stand a longer stay here?”
And yet, don’t leave angry with them. Be true to who you
are: caring, sympathetic, kind. And not as if you were being
torn away from life. But the way it is when someone dies
peacefully, how the soul is released from the body—that’s
how you should leave them. It was nature that bound you to
them—that tied the knot. And nature that now unties you.
I am released from those around me. Not dragged against
my will, but unresisting.
There are things that nature demands. And this is one of
them.
- Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?”
Starting with your own.- Remember that what pulls the strings is within—hidden
from us. Is speech, is life, is the person. Don’t conceive of
the rest as part of it—the skin that contains it, and the
accompanying organs. Which are tools—like a carpenter’s
axe, except that they’re attached to us from birth, and are no
more use without what moves and holds them still than the
weaver’s shuttle, the writer’s pencil, the driver’s whip.