Again, we can speak with reference to your own martial art.  As the beginner knows nothing about either his body posture or the positioning of his sword, neither does his mind stop anywhere within him.  If a man strikes at him with the sword, he simply meets the attack without anything in mind.

As he studies various things and is taught the diverse ways of how to take a stance, the manner of grasping his sword and where to put his mind, his mind stops in many places. Now if he wants to strike at an opponent, he is extraordinarily discomforted.  Later, as days pass and time piles up, in accordance with his practice, neither the postures of his body nor the ways of grasping the sword are weighed in his mind.  His mind simply becomes as it was in the beginning when he knew nothing and had yet to be taught anything at all.If you place yourself before your opponent, your mind will be taken by him.  You should not place your mind within yourself.  Bracing the mind in the body is something done only at the inception of training, when one is a beginner.

If you do not train in technique, but only fill your breast with principle, your body and your hands will not function.  Training in technique, if put into terms of your own martial art, is in the training that if practiced over and over again makes the five body postures one.

Even though you know principle, you must make yourself perfectly free in the use of technique.  And even though you may wield the sword that you carry with you well, if you are unclear on the deepest aspects of principle, you will likely fall short of proficiency.

Technique and principle are just like the two wheels of a cart.

In just the same way, if the mind stops with the sword with which a man is going to strike you, there will be an interval, and your own action will be lost.  But if in the interval between your opponent's striking sword and your own action you cannot introduce even the breadth of a hair, your opponent's sword should become your own.

Before a person has even been insulted, he has already departed from right-mindedness.  And for this reason, he suffers insult.  If one's right-mindedness is correct when he is associating with others, he will not be insulted by them.  Being insulted by others, one should realize that he had lost his own right-mindedness prior to the offense.

This is like Mount Fuji's being concealed by a tree thick with branches and leaves, and my not being able to see it.  But how can Mount Fuji be concealed by a single tree?  It is simply because of the narrowness of my vision and because the tree stands in the way of my vision that Mount Fuji cannot be seen.  We go on thinking that the tree is concealing Mount Fuji.  Yet it is due to the narrowness of my vision.

Takuan Soho. «The Unfettered Mind: Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master»

— В определённом возрасте, по-моему, становится не так-то легко заводить связи, — произнёс он, словно прочитав мои мысли. — Не так много поводов куда-то пойти, да и не хочется. А потом, столько всего надо делать, столько всяких формальностей, хлопот… ходить в магазин, стирать. Приходится тратить больше времени на собственное здоровье, просто чтобы поддерживать тело в более или менее рабочем состоянии. Начиная с какого-то момента жизнь становится административной — в первую очередь.

Мишель Уэльбек «Возможность острова»

Моя нынешняя инкарнация деградирует; думаю, долго она не протянет.

Мишель Уэльбек «Возможность острова»

Лучший вид на этот город - если сесть в бомбардировщик.

Иосиф Бродский, «Представление» http://lib.ru/BRODSKIJ/present.txt

By emphasizing both internal and external standards of success, parents convey to their children that outstanding performance is important to success, but personal satisfaction and trying one’s best are also important — a balance that should help to alleviate feelings of pressure.

education - How much pressure should I put on my kids to learn? - Parenting - Stack Exchange
http://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/1051/how-much-pressure-should-i-put-on-my-kids-to-learn/1065

Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You're going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.

Consider this elegant study, led by Scott Huettel at Duke. The scientists demonstrated that merely watching a computer “play” a video game – this is roughly equivalent to looking at a device on demo mode – led to increased activation in the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC), a brain area associated with the perception of agency.  

The moral is that it doesn’t take much before we start attributing feelings and intentions to a machine. 

And this doesn’t just apply to gadgets. Every company is now on Twitter and Facebook. For the most part, companies use these platforms as just another way to pump out banal promotional messages. However, I think these platforms actually have potential for corporate communication. The reason returns us to perceptions of agency. Consider this study led by the experimental philosophers Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz. They wanted to understand which psychological concepts people were willing to apply to corporations. They quickly discovered that people were perfectly happy to give companies intentionality, so that it would be acceptable to use sentences such as:

“Acme Corporation believes that its profit margin will soon increase,” or “Acme Corporation intends to release a new product this January.”

However, the vast majority of people refused to allow companies to have feelings or subjective experiences, so that sentences like this were deemed ridiculous:

“Acme Corporation is now experiencing great joy,” or “Acme Corporation is getting depressed.”

I think this asymmetry comes with important implications. When we fail to endow an organization with emotions, we’re much lower tolerance for mistakes. Instead of reacting with empathy when our plane is late, or when the product is imperfect, or when the item goes on sale the week after we bought it at full price, we react with unmitigated anger. This is why I think companies are missing the real potential of social networking platforms. Twitter and Facebook and whatever comes next aren’t just echo chambers for corporate messaging. (BP, as usual, is a case study in how not to do it.) Instead, these interactive platforms are a rare opportunity to endow a brand with agency, to inject some emotion into an emotionless corporation. By interacting directly with customers, by showing us a sense of humor, or making grammatical mistakes in tweets, or even apologizing for a mishap, we suddenly see the corporation as more than just a monolithic organization.

«Interacting with Machines» article by Jonah Lehrer, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex#ixzz0uM7Y5mBD