The Pursuit of Happiness

“Happy Bird” –|– Anthony Satori

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”

– Guillaume Apollinaire

The Pace of Sand

“Heart-Shaped Rock” –|– Anthony Satori

The thing about walking in sand is that you simply cannot rush. Each step takes time. Each step requires attention. You can choose a destination 10, 20, or even 100 feet away, but each step will only take you incrementally closer – slowly, deliberately – and you must make each stride mindfully and with care, so as to keep your balance and to keep yourself moving in the right direction. It is an exercise in patience. It is an exercise in presence. It is an exercise in Zen.

Sometimes you may think, “I will double my effort, triple it, maybe even multiply it five-fold.” But every such increase, even the most emphatic, tends to add at most maybe 5 or 10 percent to your speed – certainly not enough to be worth the additional expenditure of energy, not to mention the attendant elevation of stress, both physical and mental. Therefore, in the end, you eventually discover that your best strategy is merely to take it slow, to expend a reasonable amount of effort with each new step, and to move forward with calm, intention, and purpose – at the pace the sand will allow.

One of the delightful benefits, of course, of walking in sand in such a mindful manner is that sometimes you see things that you might have missed otherwise. Like a rock… shaped like a heart.

Blue Sky

“Blue Sky” –|– Anthony Satori

“Love is space and time, measured by the heart.”

– Marcel Proust

Chords in Harmony

“Through the Leaves” –|– Anthony Satori

“I trust if your life is right, the right things will happen at the right time. If the chords are in harmony inside, I think other things will happen in the same way. That would have sounded pretentious to me once, but I believe it now.”

– Gene Wilder