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Held in his piercing powder-blue vision, I froze. A butterfly awakened in my chest.
College had always felt more like an anchor than a kite, a tedious and time-eating entrapment.
“Cities, like people, have personalities and energies,” Corrina told me. “Different ones will welcome different souls.”
an admission of uncertainty is so often, in our culture, seen as weakness. Yet it is only when a mind admits I do not know that it becomes open to unseen possibility, and honest inquiry. It’s as if discovery becomes possible only when the fixed channels of one’s mind become electric, charged with the untamed energy of wonder. In this way, humility is the necessary precondition for all learning.
The cure for pain is in the pain. —Rumi
“When we remember to stop struggling, we rediscover we are floating. Trust the water, it will carry you.”
“Drinking to cope with sadness creates future sadness.”
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost. —Marcel Proust
I am home, but it doesn’t feel like home anymore.
Sitting at Starbucks, I thought about how, to little kids, one’s parents are like demigods, infallible. And when our heroes are exposed as merely human, they don’t diminish just a little in our vision; they dissolve like statues of sand, touched by a gentle wave.
In grief, we find a new view—a fresh perspective, which organically generates fresh expansion: personal revolution. Because in the wake of devastation, growth becomes the only survival option. In this way, loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.
I thought about how we have to feel accepted in relationships as we are. How, spending so much time with one chosen person, we need to feel totally comfortable to be ourselves in their presence. Not picked apart. Not pressured.
loneliness is not a function of company, but rather it is a consequence: an unpleasant symptom of a needy state of mind that desperately seeks to extract happiness from a source outside itself.
