4 ideas
A young village widow is blamed after Pavli, son of the elder Mavrandoni, drowns himself for love of her. At Easter the villagers corner her in the churchyard; Zorba disarms one attacker, but Mavrandoni cuts her throat while the narrator stands by, and the village turns back to its feast. The episode shows that a detached observer's sympathy, however sincere, does nothing against a community's collective will to punish.
Zorba sinks the narrator's money into an overhead cableway to bring timber down the mountain. At its grand inauguration, blessed by priests, the pylons collapse one after another and the whole venture is ruined. Instead of despairing, the two roast a lamb and dance on the beach, and the narrator feels freed rather than defeated by the loss.
Zorba says he freed himself from an obsession with cherries by eating them until he vomited, and never craved them again. The idea is that abstinence keeps a desire alive by keeping it forbidden, while deliberate excess exhausts it. Mastery of an appetite comes from going through it, not by holding it back.
The narrator once breathed warm air on a cocoon to hurry the butterfly out. It emerged before its time with crumpled wings, which it could not open, and died in his palm. He reads this as proof that natural processes have their own tempo, and that impatient intervention by an outsider destroys what it means to help.