Clarity is not a mood, and you will not reason your way into it.

Watch a wounded animal.

It will not lie down in the open. It goes to cover, it puts its back against something, and it will bite the hand that comes to help. The gentlest dog in the house bites when it is in pain, and every veterinary nurse alive muzzles first and apologises afterwards. That is not viciousness. It is a creature with one channel still open, and everything arriving through it reading as threat.

And then it licks.

It returns to the place, and returns to it, and goes on returning. The trade has a name for what that makes: acral lick dermatitis — a lick granuloma. The tongue that was cleaning the wound becomes the reason the wound stays open. The animal is not being stupid. It is doing the only thing it knows to do about a place that hurts, and the doing is what keeps it raw.

A beast can only be wounded in the body, but a man can be wounded in a thousand more ways, and each one counts.

Longing. Doubt. Frustration. Fear. Hopelessness. Five of the thousand. Watch how each of them actually behaves in you and you will find it is not a thought at all. It is a returning — the same place, gone over and over, with the same instrument. It arrives in the voice of thinking and it borrows the words of thinking, and no thought was ever produced by it.

Which is why arguing with it fails. You have never once talked a wounded animal out of anything.

What reaches a creature in that state is not an argument. It is pressure — steady, from every side, and not going anywhere. Wrap it and it quiets. Hold it and the breathing changes. That trade knows this too and uses it daily, and nobody has ever explained to the animal why it works.

The first lesson here is learning to tell your thinking from your returning. That is all it is, and it is smaller than people expect. Once a man can tell the one from the other, the returning loses most of its authority — not because he defeated it, but because he stopped taking it for himself.

What is underneath is not excitement. It is quiet, and warmth, and something that had been there the whole time with a weight sitting on it.

I have spent a lifetime on the riddles of life and I am still at it. I do not hand you answers. I hand you the method I was given and have tested, which is the only honest thing a teacher has.

The wound closes when the tongue stops. Nothing else had to change.

— Friend Tazo