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The question

What lesson has mattered most in your life?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Ram Dass

Spiritual teacher and author

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
Well, I—I've experienced that the stroke was grace. It was grace, for me, to play, to get inside, grace. I was dependent. These are things that I—those, those were graceful things. You know, pushed. And just go inside, to be—you're a quote "author" and it's a cultural thing, that role, to get into your head. But it's a head game. It's a head game. And I wanted to get down to my spiritual identity. And the stroke placed me at the spiritual identity.

Ross Simonini, The Believer, issue 115, by Skype from Hawaii, 20 November 2017 source ↗

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Question What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? Failure & regret
everyone saw me as a victim of a terrible illness. But what happened to my body was far less frightening than what happened to my soul. The stroke wiped out my faith. It took me so far from my guru that I felt my oxygen cord had been cut. ... I couldn't put the two together. Then I thought, maybe the stroke is a form of grace, and I hunted for that: how could the stroke be seen as grace? ... The stroke was giving me lessons, advanced lessons. ... It brought me into my soul, and that's grace.
Recorded Sara Davidson, Keynote talk at a conference on body and soul, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, reported in the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 2000 source ↗
Question What has life taught you about being human? Values & belief
The stroke cut out a lot of my external trips: my sports car and golf and my cello. This [ points to hand ] is just not much use with a cello, and I was—forced inside, and finding myself living in my inside. And that has made me be part of my soul. And that's perceiving my incarnation from here [ points to heart ], rather than from here [ points to head ]. And since this is words, I start from here, go over there.
Recorded Ross Simonini, The Believer, issue 115, by Skype from Hawaii, 20 November 2017 source ↗

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