"When people's chickens or dogs stray, they know to go looking for them; yet when their heart strays, they do not know to seek it. The way of learning is nothing else but this: to seek the strayed heart."
Look away from your phone and gaze out the window or at your feet for three seconds. Where had your mind wandered off to just now?
We Search for Lost Chickens—Why Not Our Lost Hearts?
Mencius was a Confucian thinker of the Warring States period, an age when lords seized each other's lands, who argued that human nature is good. He believed everyone has sprouts of goodness, but that they are easily lost if left untended.
In the same book, Mencius tells the parable of Ox Mountain. Once lush with trees, the mountain was axed day after day and grazed by cattle and sheep until it was bare—and people assumed it had always been barren. The human heart, he said, also loses its original form when it is cut away a little each day.