We cannot control our life. If we are set upon doing so, we have abdicated from peace, which must balance what is desired with what is possible. As Hokusai shows so memorably, the great wave is in waiting for any boat. It is unpredictable, as uncontrollable now as it was at the dawn of time. Will the slender boats survive or will they be overwhelmed? The risk is a human constant; it has to be accepted — and laid aside. What we can do, we do. Beyond that, we endure, our endurance framed by a sense of what matters and what does not. The worst is not that we may be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle. Yet we are fallible, and so the real worst, the antithesis of peace, is to refuse to recognize failure and humbly begin again.
Healing does not necessarily mean to become physically well or to be able to get up and walk around again.Rather, it means achieving a balance between the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. . . .At the end of their lives [five-year-old children with leukemia] they have little or no pain.They are emotionally sound, and on an intellectual level they can share things it is almost impossible to believe could come from a child.To me this is a healing, although they are not well from our earthly point of view.