The way we grow in wisdom is not linear.
The things that often nourish us are perennial and we have been engaging them since day one, in ever more complex and beautiful forms; love, loss, joy, pain, bliss and suffering.
In fact, wisdom often flourishes in the patient return to these same themes, each time revealing new aspects of something already intimate. In spiritual practice, these basic themes are things like: attachment, compassion, emptiness, judgement, insight, acceptance, faith and doubt.
Buddhism is well known for its idea of anattā, often translated as “no self.” As a result, you might often hear that the Buddha claimed “there is no self.”
However, the Buddha very rarely made such binary statements, and others familiar with his teachings point out that he never actually said “there is no self.” One at least one occassion, when asked about existence of the self, he remained silent.
A few notes on the technology behind this website:
It uses a static site generator called Hugo. Writing content offline and then generating a static site works very well for hand-written, non-dynamic content. It also means the generated website is very, very fast and eliminates many security issues. This simplicity makes it far easier to maintain over the long term.
As the content is just a collection of Markdown files that are generated into HTML and then uploaded to GitHub Pages, I’ll never lose my website, as it’s not owned by any third party. The Hugo code is open source, so I can use and modify it even if the maintainers abandon the project.