Forgetting
What Wang Yangming awakened to at Longchang was not some rare treasure—it was a forgetting. He forgot to be anxious about results, not because he despised them, but because the anxious heart is a cramped cage, and results are wild geese: they were never yours to cage in the first place. He who chases the future is chasing his own shadow—he runs swifter, and so does it; he sits down, and it sits beside him. The man of old did not fix his hopes on what was to come. So the ten thousand things came to him of their own accord, each carrying its own afternoon on its back.