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“For many decades, I’ve felt that it was my responsibility, together with my hundreds and thousands of colleagues, to address and change the trajectory of climate and biodiversity in order to bequeath a much safer planet to future generations,” she said. “When you have that self-imposed responsibility on your shoulders, it makes the work very, very hard because there are so many things we don’t control.”

From: "What Christiana Figueres thinks the climate movement can learn from Buddhism: Figueres, the architect of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, has been helping people around the world understand the teachings of Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh." at Yale Climate Connections

"Thích Nhất Hạnh often used composting as a metaphor for transformation. He summarized the idea with a pithy aphorism: “No mud, no lotus,” referring to the idea that the lotus flower only roots and blooms in the mud. He taught that people spend much of their time in the mud, wading through complex, inescapable, emotional experiences." (op cit)

Wandering Mind

We are the progeny of countless generations of ancestors who had to not become totally fixated on what they were doing. Those who did become fixated didn’t notice a predator, got eaten, and didn’t reproduce. What we are trying to do goes against millions of years of evolution. Having a wandering mind is just how we are constructed. So it’s no big deal when your mind wanders off; you should actually consider it a victory that you noticed it wandered, rather than a defeat that it did its natural thing of wandering. In fact it is extremely helpful if you intentionally relax when you notice you’ve become distracted, and then gently reestablish attention on your meditation object. The mind state you are aiming to create could well be called relaxed diligence. 

Leigh Brasington Right Concentration (2015)

Gandhāran Buddhist texts, believed to be the oldest Buddhist Manuscripts yet discovered