"delay is a form of hiding from reality"
“Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true.” - Audre Lorde
“Just because someone doesn't love you as you wish, it doesn't mean you're not loved with all his/her being.” ― Gabriel García Márquez
Effort is more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing. What we call “success” is just the manifestation of our mind’s ability to categorize things. This is “success.” That is “failure.” Who says? You says. That’s all. Reality is what it is, beyond all concepts of success and failure.
Two years later, grief has become the air itself
How can we live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fears — and not just on the vapors that the volcano exudes?
What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
— Joan Didion, Commencement Address at UC Riverside (1975)
The more I think about the grandiose framing of the titanic pressures of modern life, the boots of capitalism marching triumphantly over our leisure time, the more I think it might be a modern way of shielding ourselves from a fundamental human discomfort: that so much of what we do means so little.
So, the idea of walking in someone else’s shoes and trying to understand what they’re feeling, I believe has no merit. I think the call is much more difficult and much more powerful. And that is: to ask the person for their story of what it’s like in their shoes and to believe them. I think it’s not about guessing what they’re feeling.
"What if all this time we have misunderstood the story of the Tower of Babel?…What if it was not just to different tribes but to each individual human being that a separate language was given, unique as fingerprints. And, step two, to make life among humans even more strifeful and confounding, he beclouded their perception of this. So that while we might understand that there are many peoples speaking many different languages, we are fooled into thinking that everyone in our own tribe speaks the same language we do." -Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through
In America, to be unaccustomed to violence is a privilege — I am fortunate to only have witnessed it through the screen.
"The difficult part is admitting that the character of America has been observed and explained many times over by the oppressed. If you’re witnessing fascism on a livestream, you’re too late."
"To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."
the first responsibility of love is to listen
"Very often people think kindness and niceness are a form of weakness or fear. That is so not true for me. [...]
Because I think kindness is very intentional. It requires a great forbearance. You have to forbear your personal needs. You have to forbear your ego. [..] I think generosity or kindness as a sort of muscle, and it's a muscle that is worth developing."
"Choose the important over the urgent"
Rituals need a strong container to focus our attention. Without this, we lose the connection between action and intention.
When you say you are good at everything, the clear implication is you don’t understand what you are good at.