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What Would Lassie Do, which is as good a moral code as any.
It wasn’t enough just to say I didn’t like the way the world was, I had to start saying, ‘Okay, what kind of world do I want?’”
“Magic is volatile; you will never get exactly what you think you’re going to get. Whatever it is will scare you,” says the Oracle. “But it will also delight you and exhilarate you. Magic is a wild animal. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t see the problems.”
The economy of love doesn’t respond to hard work, to sheer will. No, the sort of relationship that we’re discussing requires, at minimum, two participants, which means that it is always reliant on the ultimately unknowable thoughts and feelings of another person. Sure, you can probably seduce someone into falling in love with you, but that leads to a lifetime of never being loved for your true self.
We have always been comforted by lists.
the theology of “write it down, make it happen.” It’s an offshoot of the law of attraction,
The law of attraction is, of course, the misguided notion that positive thoughts are essentially all that is necessary to attract positive results.
prosperity gospel (i.e., think about money, think about God, and the second will bring you the first), and its adherents insist that it is as real as the law of gravity.
the idea that the mind could heal the body, and was a strong influence on both the Christian Scientist movement and a movement called New Thought.
“the law of attraction works universally on every plane of action, and we attract whatever we desire or expect.”
power of your intention
not seeing the List, the meeting of a partner, as part of an acquisitional desire.
love doesn’t cease to exist when any one of us falls out of its spell.
All spirits are inventions, but that doesn’t make them not real. They’re portals to a different form of consciousness.”
“Magic is also a discipline; you’re trying to resonate on the level of love, to work in service of love, to become a better person.”
what I really think about love: It’s all luck, in the purest and most abstract sense.
when people are successful they tend to credit something they did; when they fail they tend to blame it on luck.
Love might feel like an achievement, but it is rarely dependent on merit.
That’s not to say that preparation and intent are meaningless, but it is the random workings of the world that shape their outcome.
because we all wonder if extraordinary events change our essential selves.
The Three Highs are pretty easy to guess: high education, high physical stature, and high income.
It’s a comforting story, and I guess people just go pray to him hoping that he’ll speed up the process.
The time has come to conduct a scientific experiment. I need to come up with a List that calls in something other than the perfect partner so that I can test the efficacy of the concept itself. But what? It can’t be something inanimate, like money or, say, a perfect dress. It needs to be something with at least a degree of agency, some ability to choose whether it will cross my path and—paths crossed—how it will interact with me. And I also need something that has a variety of traits that can actually be enumerated in a list.
An experiment but not a very scientific one. (e.g. small sample size, observer bias, texas sharpshooter?)
And then I realize that it can just be a different kind of perfect partner—a dog! I’ll make the List for the perfect dog, and if the world shows that dog to me, it will be mine.
“Rather than judging love by its duration, we should give up judging love at all. Love is the life force flowing through us. Love is the moment when the walls that separate us from the rest of the universe come tumbling down. And we stand there, naked and afraid, but not alone. Even a glimpse of that not-aloneness is worth it. Because it’s proof that we are part of something larger and more important than ourselves.”
Above more poetic than the trite, 'better to have love and lose; then to never have loved at all.'
We are all the center of our own universes. Even if your life is full of people you love and care for, you have to breathe for yourself first.
Jade Chang is the award-winning author of The Wangs vs. the World
