“It’s a verb. It’s an active engagement with all kinds of feelings—positive ones and primitive ones and loathsome ones. But it’s a very active verb. And it’s often surprising how it can kind of ebb and flow. It’s like the moon. We think it’s disappeared, and suddenly it shows up again. It’s not a permanent state of enthusiasm.”
Full article: Love is not a permanent state of enthusiasm
“Marriage is an aggregate of multiple narratives. It belongs to the people who are in it, but it also belongs to the people who are supporting it and living around it: family, friends, community. As I once said, and it became a kind of a saying for me, when you pick a partner, you pick a story, and then you find yourself in a play you never auditioned for. And that is when the narratives clash.”
— Esther Perel
Full article: Love is not a permanent state of enthusiasm
“In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.”
13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings. Happy blog-birthday Maria!
“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
— Henry Miller
“What you are living is the evidence of what you are thinking and feeling every single time.”
— Abraham Hicks
“People should think about the consequences of the little choices they make each day. What do you buy? Where did it come from? Where was it made? Did it harm the environment? Did it lead to cruelty to animals? Was it cheap because of child slave labor?”
— Jane Godall
More in this article.
“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.”
– Chinese Proverb
“Be afraid of the calmest person in the room.”
— Bruce Lee
“Instead of buying your children all the things you never had, you should teach them all the things you were never taught. Material wears out but knowledge stays.”
— Bruce Lee
“In the end,
we will conserve only what we love,
we will love only what we understand,
and we will understand
only what we are taught.”
— baba dioum
(via)
“The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.”
— Bertrand Russell
“When I was born, I donned a space suit for living on this planet. It was this body, this nice spacesuit, and it had a steering mechanism, my prefrontal lobes and all the brain motors coordinating stuff. . . . You get so good at using your spacesuit that you can’t differentiate yourself from your spacesuit anymore. . . . It’s what I call somebody training.”
— Ram Dass
“The best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them.”
— Ernest Hemingway
This is beautiful.
“What does it mean to hold space for another person? It means that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome. When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgment and control.”
— Heather Plett
“I can’t give my students more time in their lives; but what I try to do is change the way they think about and value it in the first place. My class typically includes students who aren’t art majors, some of whom may never have made art before. I give them the same advice every quarter: Leave yourself twice as much time as you think you need for a project, knowing that half of that may not look like “making” anything at all. There is no Soylent version of thought and reflection — creativity is unpredictable, and it simply takes time.”
— Jenny Odell
“The greatest gift you can ever give another person is your own happiness”
― Esther Hicks
“You can get to where you want to be from wherever you are—but you must stop spending so much time noticing and talking about what you do not like about where you are.”
― Esther Hicks
“Everything you have ever dreamed of having is being held in trust for you until you are at the level in which you are ready to receive it. You have to rise. You have to become the kind of person who deserves the life you want.”
— Brianna Wiest
“The most important thing in life is your inner energy. If you’re always tired and never enthused, then life is no fun. But if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience. Learn to work with these things. Through meditation, through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open. You do this by just relaxing and releasing. You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over. Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.”
― Michael A. Singer
“By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well.”
— Robert Bringhurst
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
— E. B. White
“People’s ability to connect is the glue that holds our culture together. By thinning out our interactions and splintering our media landscape, the Internet has taken away the common ground we need to understand one another. Each of us is becoming more confident about our own world just as it drifts farther from the worlds of others. Empathy requires us to understand that even people who disagree with us have a lived experience as deep as our own. But in the fractured landscape of social media, we have little choice but to see the other side as obtuse, dishonest or both. Unless we reverse this trend and revive empathy, we have little chance of mending the tears in our social fabric.”
The Technology of Kindness, by Jamil Zaki
