A Snail Is Slow and Still in Time, by the Buddhist Nun Jeongmok

Some books by Buddhist monastics can make life feel a little more bearable for an afternoon. The sentences are short enough to read without effort and deep enough to return to. Reading Jeongmok, I found that it was my own heart that felt a little lighter.

Early in the book she returns to the idea that learning how to live with your own mind changes the problems you meet. Reading a few lines at a time felt almost like listening to someone read them aloud.

Two passages stayed with me. One treats death as a change rather than a curtain falling. Another, from the Burmese meditation teacher U Jotika, considers how a person who has felt truly lost can come to recognize a direction worth taking.

Hardship as a Vitamin

Jeongmok compares suffering to a vitamin. I had never met the comparison before. Pain is something I would rather avoid in the moment. The comparison made me think about what can come of having lived through it.

Elsewhere she writes about the short time we share with friends and family. A quarrel can take more of that time than we intend to give it. Another passage describes friendship as a test of character because the support it asks of us goes beyond convenience or amusement.

Her account of a soulmate appealed to me. Two people can understand one another while leaving room for each other’s freedom. Neither has to keep score.

Peace Begins With Me

Among the ideas in the book, I kept coming back to the sense that peace begins in the way I meet what happens to me. That puts at least part of it within reach.

The title comes from a poem attributed in the book to the French poet Jean Rousselot. The poem asks us to leave an injured snail a little time before rushing to help, to resist advising a star that has strayed from its place and to let a river find its own pace. Those images were a quiet way to close a book about patience.