Be completely empty.
Be perfectly serene.
The ten thousand things arise together;
in their arising is their return.
Now they flower,
and flowering
sink homeward,
returning to the root.
The return to the root
is peace.
Peace: to accept what must be,
to know what endures.
In that knowledge is wisdom.
I might have said, amazed forever. I wanted to be curious, interested, interesting, hopeful – and a little bit odd was okay too. I did not know if I wanted to run a bakery, be a postal worker, play a violin or the timpani drum in an orchestra. That part was unknown.