I cultivate deep courage and compassion within my mind, body, and spirit.

Nothing grown arrives on the day you would like it to.

Compassion tends to be learned backwards — practised first on strangers, where it is cheap, and only much later turned inward, where it is expensive. The person who is patient with a slow cashier and merciless with themselves at midnight is not a hypocrite. They just haven't finished the transfer.

Courage accumulates the same way, in unremarkable deposits. The phone call made. The appointment kept. The thing said at the table when letting it pass would have been easier. None of them feel like cultivation at the time. They are what it looks like.