Determination is an unbroken line, a backbone. It is when every situation is anchored to an unseen aim that still, keeps everything together. Without determination, life becomes scattered. Experiences are pleas ant and kept, unpleasant and left. It’ random and one is at the mercy of life.

Determination makes you sit up straight and love everything, because it’s all part of moving forward. Day and night you have the feeling that you only have to seek and you can touch the hard core of wisdom that rests inside each moment. You can focus on that, let the toughness is in seeking that and then action is automatically as it should be. Gently right.

Battering at life from the outside, trying to change what’ visible is inverted determination. It makes your face hard and unyielding and though it may bring visible success, there can be a floundering inside. Determination is not therefore a matter so much of action as of stillness. When a quality of mind - peace, happiness, depth, purity - can remain still and uninterrupted by the bumps of life, that is true determination. Such stability maintained for long enough, penetrates the surface of life anyway and it changes. The bumps go.

You have to feed determination, to nourish the qualities you wish to keep with you constantly. How? By understanding them, examining them, using them. They are a part of your nature anyway, but it’s been winter for so long that they’ve gone underground. Sometimes you have to burrow to find them and coax them to the surface. Hence the need for silence.

Silence brings the strength to go on, the steadiness to succeed, the soft ness to slip past difficulties unnoticed. If determination breaks, it’s best to stop for a few moments, be silent and find value again, or else what you do will be spineless. Feel the bones of the situation, then fall in love with the task.