"What good are you, what worth have you, if you spend all your energy making yourself precious and ignore the world as it crumbles to dust around you?" you can

"What good are you, what worth have you, if you spend all your energy making yourself precious and ignore the world as it crumbles to dust around you?" you can try to hold the world upright, but it's still crumbling. your self is a part of the world you exercise some control over. anyway, the point isn't to make yourself precious, that would really be self-absorption. i consider this account of shunryu suzuki to be more the aim: "I went to see him after he'd been in the hospital a couple of days. When I got to his room the doctor and a couple of specialists had just left and he motioned me in and asked me to sit down on the bed next to him. He said, 'I have cancer.' He just mouthed the words as if he was telling me some good thing in a whisper. His lunch had just been brought in ‑‑ it was on a table by his bed. He patted the seat next to him and said, 'Now we can eat off the same plate,' and he began to feed me some of his lunch. He'd have a bite, then I'd have a bite ‑‑ which of course is what we couldn't do as long as we thought he had hepatitis. And he said, 'This cancer is my friend, and my practice will be to take care of this sickness.'"