“Two things stand like stone”

The words of the Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon ring especially true in these times:

Life is mostly froth and bubble;

Two things stand like stone—

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

Boredom

When asked to define “boredom” recently, I came up with this ‘masterpiece’:

Boredom: an external symptom of the deeper inability to be at peace with oneself, characterized by restlessness and by discontent at the inability of external stimuli to permanently fill a soul-shaped void in one’s life. 

(Yes, I did tag this wisdom. Tags don’t always mean what they mean; their vācyârtha can be overriden by a lakṣyârtha, and sometimes they suggest a vyaṅgyârtha over and above and/or alongside that.)

If you're stuck on a problem

This is a profound statement by Robert Pirsig, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.