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by
Sarah Wilson
But! One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we’re doing.
“We must suffer alone. But we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbors, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: ‘I know . . .’”
I think all the diagnoses boil down to anxiety. That is, an itchy sense that things are not right, a buzzing dis-ease. Whatever doctors want to call it, the feeling is the same: it’s that gut-twisting, grip-from-behind, heart-sinky feeling that winds me in tighter spirals and makes everything go faster and with so much urgency and soon enough I’m running down a steep hill faster than my poor spinning legs can carry me.
Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.”
“Anxiety is all about a lack of connection and a need for spiritual answers,”
You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day.
As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why can endure any how.”
“The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.”
I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until . . . the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and
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To sit in anxiety is to stay a little longer. A little longer. A little longer. And to see what happens. We experiment with it, curiously.
Frankl also concluded that the purpose of life is to suffer. Actually, he went further. The purpose of life is to suffer well. By which he meant to go down into pain, own it, and not run from it. To sit in it. And in the process find meaning.
Frankl maintained that finding the meaning of life is our ultimate purpose and suffering brings us to this purpose.
“Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering,” wrote David Brooks
The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness . . . I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
In my experience, living with a wobbly mind is akin to being charged with carrying around a large, shallow bowl filled to the brim with water for the rest of your life. You have to tread super carefully so as not to slosh it all out. So you must learn to walk steadily and gently. And be super aware of every movement around you, ready to correct a little bit of off-balance-ness here, a tilt to the left there. This is just the way it is. Living this way requires vigilance and is about constant refinement. If you waiver and get unsteady, the water starts to slosh. And if you don’t bring yourself
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