Right Speech

From Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Heart of the Buddha's" teaching,
"Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and deep listening to bring joy and happiness to others and relieve others of their suffering."

I feel like my time in the UK is a real unique opportunity to practice right speech. I feel like I have gotten lazy lately with my speech lately. I use a lot of slang, a lot of profanity. My sense of humor has deteriorated into plays on mispronounced words and jokes that few people get because they are intermingled with such illiterate speech. I feel like communicating with people who are "separated by a common language" as well as such an internationally diverse population will force me to choose my words very carefully as well as take the opportunity to do more listening. I think it is something that I was unnaturally good at as a youth, and a part of me I am excited to re-embrace. I am so excited to learn all I can about the people who are coming my way, as well as to share genuine parts of myself. I think this can be a springboard to working on the other seven aspects of the Noble Eightfold path.

On a pleasantly similar note, I spoke to a very important person today. I would like to say it changed everything. But it did at least change my unsettledness about a certain aspect of my life. This person is very special to me and it was very good to reconnect. Some part of me feels more at ease. Hope springs eternal.

I have four more days. Kind of scary, kind of exciting. Tonight I am going to put together a couple of playlists for the plane ride. Pack some clothes. Look up the rules and regulations for luggage.

I am taking a big ol' deep breath tonight. Remembering who I am. And hearing my own beat...

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion... It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-