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We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
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Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
It’s okay to be who you are.
the forests we find ourselves in are metaphorical, and sometimes we are unable to escape them, but with a change of perspective we can live among the trees.
Our mind might make prisons, but it also gives us keys.
Self-forgiveness makes the world better. You don’t become a good person by believing you are a bad one.
Hope always involves a soaring and a reaching. Hope flies.
hope is the thing we most want to cling on to in periods of despair or worry.
To feel hope you don’t need to be in a great situation. You just need to understand that things will change. Hope is available to all. You don’t need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.
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In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.
it is important to always realize our own vastness. Our own rooms. We are multiplexes of possibility.
We are more than the feelings we witness.
To remember during the bad days It won’t last. You have felt other things. You will feel other things again.
The worst part of any experience is the part where you feel like you can’t take it anymore. So, if you feel like you can’t take it anymore, the chances are you are already at the worst point. The only feelings you have left to experience are better than this one. You are still here. And that is everything.
Ten books that helped my mind Letters to a Young Poet—Rainer Maria Rilke Poems—Emily Dickinson Henry David Thoreau’s journal When Things Fall Apart—Pema Chödrön The House at Pooh Corner—A. A. Milne Bird by Bird—Anne Lamott Meditations—Marcus Aurelius Tao Te Ching—Laozi Serious Concerns—Wendy Cope Dream Work—Mary Oliver
Words are important. Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can comfort.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,” wrote Angelou. Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can’t speak, we can write. When we can’t write, we can read. When we can’t read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.
When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value.
It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.
Don’t say yes to things you wish you had the confidence to say no to. Don’t worry if you do.
The reason to be selfless is selfish. Nothing makes ourselves feel better than not thinking of our selves.
Hope isn’t the same thing as happiness. You don’t need to be happy to be hopeful. You need instead to accept the unknowability of the future, and that there are versions of that future that could be better than the present. Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility. The acceptance that if we are suddenly lost in a forest, there will be a way through. All we need is a plan, and a little determination.
The best of life exists beyond the things we are encouraged to crave.
Be curious. Go outside. Get to bed on time. Hydrate. Breathe from the diaphragm. Eat happy. Get a routine baggy enough to live in. Be kind. Accept that not everyone will like you. Appreciate those who do. Don’t be defined. Allow fuck-ups. Want what you already have. Learn to say no to things that get in the way of life. And to say yes to the things that help you live.
Life is not a ladder to climb a puzzle to solve a key to find a destination to reach a problem to fix
Life is “understood backward; but it must be lived forward”
No is a good word. It keeps you sane. In an age of overload, no is really yes. It is yes to having the space you need to live.
movement isn’t progress if we are heading in the wrong direction.
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. Helen Keller, We Bereaved
Even if we are at a point in life where we can’t appreciate things, it sometimes helps to remember there are things in this world to enjoy, when we are ready.
The most painful moments in life expand us. And when the pain leaves, space remains. Space we can fill with life itself.
No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.
We exist out of uncertainty. Out of near impossibility. And yet we exist.
“My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness.”
Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Scroll your consciousness for reasons to be grateful to be you. The only fear of missing out that matters is the fear of missing out on yourself.
“Forever is composed of nows,” as Emily Dickinson told
When we are imagining our future or mourning the past we aren’t in either—we are inhabiting the present, and only the present,
The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people
beneath a beautiful sky with the wind tenderly caressing your hair like an invisible mother.
It is entirely human to be imperfect. It is entirely human to be flawed. It is entirely human to have certain prejudices and have internalized some of the more dubious characteristics of the place and time we live in and the environment we grew up in.
True virtue is something we achieve by looking inward, to our own motives and flaws and cravings, and addressing those sticky and difficult and contradictory parts of ourselves. ( Virtue is a journey, not a destination.)
Work with what you have. Exist in this world. Be the asymmetric square. Be the wonky tree. Be the real you.
We need kindness. We need a way to see the difference between who people are and what they sometimes do. And that includes us.
