If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The rive is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can't accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don't make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace other. We accept other as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.
When we deed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That's why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness.
Understanding someone's suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love's other name. If you don't understand, you can't love.
If your parents didn't love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? ... The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.
Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person.
Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don't know the cause, it's very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong. We expect and hope for something much better so we'll feel less alone, less empty. The desire to understand ourselves and to understand life is a deep thirst. There's also the deep thirst to be loved and to love. We are ready to love and be loved. It's very natural. But because we feel empty, we try to find an object of our love. Sometimes we haven't had the time to understand ourselves, yet we've already found the object of our love. When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can't be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don't know what to search for. In everyone there's a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day!
Tich Nhat Hanh