Off By an Inch in the Beginning...

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May 30, 2023

a project of ServiceSpace

Reflection and action must never be undertaken independently.

- Paulo Freire -

Off By an Inch in the Beginning...

The Venerable Master Hua, famously and pithily recounted: "Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end." I have to say -- Christopher Columbus might have benefited from that advice in 1492 when he missed India by nearly 10,000 miles. I wonder what that says about the scope of our compounding trajectory 530 years later. But luckily the NASA engineers working on getting Apollo 13 back to earth from new explored terrains weren't off by an inch in their calculations. Truly, never has Master Huas shared wisdom been more critical than today in terms of our internal alignment. As you exit this sacred environment where you are encouraged and supported to constantly be aware of and to align with your center -- where you are encouraged to veer off by not even an inch -- you may well be entering environments where there is little or no time and space for that kind of careful internal discernment and calibration. And the hard reality is that you may not even notice it. Because the thing about being off by an inch is that we most often don't feel the misalignment until it is too late to make a quick course correction." Preeta Bansal shares more in this thought-provoking 2023 commencement speech, delivered at Dharma Realm Buddhist University. { read more }