Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

by Cheryl Strayed

She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

Mercy.

It would behoove you to reflect upon what went right in that relationship and what went wrong; to contemplate how you might carry forth the former in your current and/or future relationships and quash the latter.

Reflect

Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

Love

You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Its up to you.

It’s what most of us have to give a few times over the course of our lives: to love with a mindfully clear sense of purpose, even when it feels outrageous to do so.

Hmmm

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve.

Nerve

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

Being human.

And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people on the planet know: that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we’re all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

Life.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

You have to...

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours.

Life

You will do this when you’re ready to do this. To be ready you need only the desire to change your life. To succeed, most people need a community of support.

Yup

Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did?

This

Your son was your greatest gift in his life and he is your greatest gift in his death too. Receive it. Let your dead boy be your most

Greatest gift

The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.

Requirements for having a relatiolnship...

I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do.

Life

Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

Grateful

Difficulty, solitude, and risk are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It’s because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance. It forges us out of who we were before into the person we will become.

Rite of passage

The bold move. The character-building, no-helicopter-in-sight approach to parenting. I would not make my kids take cell phones on a backpacking trip because I know the wilderness is good medicine and cell phones reverse that medicine by sucking the spirit out of our souls.

Parenting

Because I know that it is only in going without cell phones—in being disconnected—that my children will find a connection deeper than anything anyone can teach them. That in not requiring my kids to repeatedly check in with me or their dad while they’re venturing into the wild places, I’m helping them grow and find their strength and figure out who they are.

Nature

I’d silently send my love to them across the universe in the way people have sent their silent love across the universe to the people they love throughout all time, and I would know in my heart that they had received it. I would be at peace.

No cell phones