So leave it alone

To torment your body, [Buddha] discovered, is really to value it every bit as much as when you coddle it. So leave it alone; do it no harm. Do not harm anything. Time, the recycler, takes care of that job, constantly, dispassionately, inevitably. Which means you're free: free to be nothing, or nothing in particular, which really is freedom when you consider the grief you caused yourself trying to be something special.
— Holland Cotter, review of "Awakening: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan" at the Japan Society, New York Times, April 6, 2007, E31.