Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves, " said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. Rebecca Solnit
About This Quote

If a person had a scar on their skin, that was something that would stay with them. It would be something they would worry about every day and it would give them pain every time they saw it. The scar was something that affected them even when no one else was looking. If the scar was empty though, it didn’t matter if someone saw it, because there was nothing there to hurt them.

This is what emptiness means. It doesn’t matter what happens in your life if you are empty inside. Emptiness allows you to continue on even when everything else falls apart around you.

Source: A Field Guide To Getting Lost

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Augustus, " I said. "Really. You don't have to do this."" Sure I do, " he said. "I found my Wish.""God, you're the best, " I told him." I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel, " he answered. - John Green

  2. Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another... - Roman Payne

  3. We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge,... - Pico Iyer

  4. There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave. - Charlotte Eriksson

  5. A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. - Lao Tzu

More Quotes By Rebecca Solnit
  1. The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called...

  2. Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

  3. How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace,...

  4. Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the...

  5. The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.

Related Topics