The Unix Way
Break the hard problem into simple problems.
Create an elegant solution for each simple problem.
Chain the individual solutions to elegantly solve the hard problem.
At night, deep in the mountains…
At night, deep in the mountains,
I sit in meditation
The affairs of men never reach here;
Everything is quiet and empty,
All the incense has been swallowed up
By the endless night.
My robe has become a garment of dew.
Unable to sleep I walk out into the woods—
Suddenly, above the highest peak,
The full moon appears.
- Hakuin (1686-1768)‘Haiku Moon’ brushwork by Marie Taylor http://www.zenbrush.com
"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."
— Thich Nhat Hanh
"Take the time to eat an orange in mindfulness. If you eat an orange in forgetfulness, caught in your anxiety and sorrow, the orange is not really there. But if you bring your mind and body together to produce true presence, you can see that the orange is a miracle. Peel the orange. Smell the fruit. See the orange blossoms in the orange, and the rain and the sun that have gone through the orange blossoms. The orange tree that has taken several months to bring this wonder to you. Put a section in your mouth, close your mouth mindfully, and with mindfulness feel the juice coming out of the orange. Taste the sweetness. Do you have the time to do so? If you think you don’t have time to eat an orange like this, what are you using that time for? Are you using your time to worry or using your time to live?"
(Source: whentheworldgoesboom)
"What knows without knowledge is the true mind."
"Sometimes I’d rather be a tree frog. I don’t think they fall asleep worried that they’ve been a bad tree frog that afternoon or envying kingfishers or resenting their own diet or habitat. They just seem to spend 100% of their time being magnificent at being a tree frog. We spend most of our time regardless of our religion or lack of it, disappointed in ourselves, ashamed of ourselves, envious of others — always becoming and rarely being."
"So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead."
