Dalai Lama Was Leading His Country During

Suffering Is A Privilege. It Moves Us Toward Thinking Of Essential Things And Shakes Us Out Of Complacency. Calamity Cracks You Open, Moves You To Change Your Ways.

[the Dalai Lama] Told Me Some Years Ago, "i've Made Every Concession To China, And I've Been As Open And Tolerant As I Could, And Still Things Get Worse In Tibet." If You Look At It From One Point Of View, As He Himself Says, His Monastic Position Of Forbearance And Nonviolence Hasn't Reaped Any Benefits. And Yet, He's Thinking In Terms Of The Long Term, Of Centuries.

Death Undoes Us Less, Sometimes, Than The Hope That It Will Never Come.

Travel Spins Us Round In Two Ways At Once: It Shows Us The Sights And Values And Issues That We Might Ordinarily Ignore; But It Also, And More Deeply, Shows Us All The Parts Of Ourselves That Might Otherwise Grow Rusty.

When I Was Two Years Old, I Heard About His [dalai Lama] Flight From Tibet. Being Very Little, I Said, "oh, Good Tibetans, Bad Chinese." Those Were The Black-and-white Ways That I Thought.