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“Cleaning up the damage created by others is a noble but ultimately fruitless act. Because the destroyers simply grow bolder, less accountable for their actions. They leave others to pay the price for their depravity.”
She used to think that, that there was some force in the world that kept people from doing bad things over and over. But the news of the world proved that it wasn’t so—the opioid crisis, the war in Ukraine, the planet dying, and corporations running
amok. The truth was that no one stopped the worst things from happening.
“You go back again and again, try to rewrite the truth. But the past won’t be rewritten, no matter how hard we wish it.”
It was just that he was young and privileged, and he didn’t know how painful adult life could be.
Change is relentless, Miller used to say. Even when things seem like they’re standing still, they’re in constant motion. The good. The bad. Nothing lasts.
“Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears.” CARL JUNG Civilization in Transition
“Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.” RALPH WALDO EMERSON
And only a grown woman who’d been to hell and back knew what a gift it was to own yourself, to know yourself.
There’s a day, she’d told him. There’s a last, best day. The day when everything is as good as it’s ever going to be. And if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it. It’s the day when you’re healthy, and everyone you love is okay, and maybe the sun is shining, and you’re doing something stupid like making a cup of tea or reading a book on the porch. And there’s a whole list of things you want but don’t have, and that might be what you’re thinking about. And not a single one of them matters. Because everything that’s important is right there. And, Mav, it’s so easy to miss it completely.
Mav generally took the bumblebee approach to all problems: ignore them and hope they’ll go away.
Mammoth hurricanes and cyclones, raging wildfires, a pandemic that kills millions, devastating earthquakes, tsunamis. Social media. Ha ha. That’s a joke—but not really. Has anything hurt us more? Has anything unstitched the fabric of our humanity more than the things that we have devised to entertain ourselves? Humankind destroys itself with brilliant creativity, but everything comes from mother earth, even technology. There’s nothing more brutally organic than the human mind and all its diabolical inventions.
Why do we have to try to own it? Her father used to marvel at houses built on the coasts, near the forests, on the cliffs. Don’t they know they don’t belong there?
“Maybe a lot of us, women especially, go through life pleasing people. First we try to be what our parents want us to be,”
“Then maybe our boyfriends or husbands. Then everyone—social media, our kids, the
neighbors. It’s not even conscious all the time. It often takes a moment of reckoning before we ask ourselves, Who am I? What am I doing here? What do I want?
Sometimes closure is a thing we find within, he’d said. It’s not necessarily given by another person. It can be something we give ourselves
