If someone asks me how to make a big pot I tell them: “you get over the failures.”

When I am making an oboe reed I spend days failing. My success is that this didn’t stop me. I got upset because I spent twenty hours on this thing and I failed. I feel terrible. But that’s life. You’re born, you grew up, you get old and you die. It’s a painful process. So the question becomes how we take the small things that happened in between: our attachment and our pain and are letting go and make a long-range plan.

I went through this experience yesterday. I was throwing a pot and it wasn’t just what I wanted. I spent hours on it. I was on the sixth pot and I finally got it. I remember thinking: “why can’t I just get to the first time?”

That’s just the way it goes. You just have to accept it. When I think about other people who have lost a child or something I have never experienced anything like that. People lose a limb or a child, or they get cancer and it could happen to me tomorrow. It’s just what happens.

I went through a period where I was riding motorcycles. I got in a big accident and I broke my leg. It slowed me way down. I was in a wheelchair and it took me a couple of years to be able to walk. It could have been my neck. I hit a car and flew through the air for 30 feet. I didn’t kill my self and the experience was profound. I had a second chance.

The momentum of day-to-day life can be so consuming that you don’t have time to think about anything else. I saw an interview on TV with Dustin Hoffman. The interviewer said: “you have achieved so much in your lifetime.”

Anda Dustin Hoffman replied: “yes, but think about all the things I didn’t do.”

My life is so small compared to the zillions of other ways of being.