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the truth that it’s over in a blink, and we may be near the end, and that we have to live as if it’s going to be okay, no matter what.
When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right.
If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.
The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.
Nor did I know about grace, that it meets you exactly where you are, at your most pathetic and hopeless, and it loads you into its wheelbarrow and then tips you out somewhere else in ever so slightly better shape.
The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.
Booker T. Washington said, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him,”
Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
If we work hard and are lucky, we may come to see everyone as precious, struggling souls.
Frederick Buechner addresses this: “And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.”
I don’t want my life’s ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous,
Wendell Berry words “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,”
If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
I love Ram Dass’s line that when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.
truth comes in small moments and visions, not galaxies and canyons; not the crash of ocean waves and cymbals.
Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have ever been and the age you are at this very moment.
Who they were in utero, in kindergarten, in high school, in bed last night, was the very best they could be at the time; was in fact the only way they could be at the time.
