Brave Enough: A Mini Instruction Manual for the Soul

by Cheryl Strayed

Love many, trust few, and always paddle your own canoe.

Put yourself in the way of beauty – that

when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and by allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage. There are some things you can’t understand yet.

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness. It

There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.

Hello Fear. Thank you for being here. You’re my indication that I’m doing what I need to do.

Leaving a relationship because you want to doesn’t exempt you from your obligation to be a decent human being. You can leave and still be a compassionate friend to your partner. Leaving because you want to doesn’t mean you pack your bags the moment there’s strife or struggle or uncertainty.

How wild it was, to let it be.

Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fallout. It’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do – have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep tolerating someone who treats you terribly. There isn’t a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself, the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing.

We all like to think we’re right about what we believe about ourselves and what we often believe are only the best, most moral things. We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.