We always do what's natural, only sometimes we shouldn't do it.
Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.
That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.
Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.
These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.
When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer. "
Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.
To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.
Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.
There are some persons who never succeed from being too indolent to undertake anything; and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.