Archives
“Life is in a constant state of change. And so are we. To get upset by things is to wrongly assume that they will last. To kick ourselves or blame others is grabbing at the wind. To resent change is to wrongly assume that you have a choice in the matter. Everything is change. Embrace that. Flow with it.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 340)
“Every great opportunity has many reasons why it could fail. You have to trust your ability to solve problems along the way. People who look for reasons why things won’t work, struggle to take action. People who look for reasons why things will work—and solve problems as they arise—make things happen.”
James Clear, Blog
“It’s better to be alone than to spend time with toxic people. It’s better to do nothing than to work on something that doesn’t matter. It’s better to rest than to climb the wrong mountain.”
James Clear, Blog
“In my lowest moments, I fantasize about getting sick again. I miss the sense of purpose and clarity I felt while in treatment—the way staring your mortality straight in the eye simplifies things and reroutes your focus to what really matters. I miss the hospital’s ecosystem. Like me, everyone there was broken, but out here, among the living, I feel like an imposter, overwhelmed and unable to function.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 214)
“Moving on. It’s a phrase I obsess over: what it means, what it doesn’t how to do it for real. It seemed so easy at first, too easy, and it’s starting to dawn on me that moving on is a myth—a lie you sell yourself on when your life has become unendurable. It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past—that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding—and that all of this, when it catches up to you, won’t come for blood.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 208)
“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 190)
“Anyone with a smartphone is familiar with the feeling of having somehow, as if by accident, lost a precious hour to their device. But thinking ill of that behavior only induces guilt and makes the problem worse. It creates a moral hierarchy that some actions are good, and some are bad. We have to realize that anything we want to do with our time is fine as long as we do it on our schedule.”
Nir Eyal
“Melissa painted self-portraits from bed; I wrote self-portraits from bed. Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain. We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 157)
“Meaning is not found in the material realm—dinner, jazz, cocktails, conversation or whatever. Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.”
Howard, via Between Two Kingdoms (Page 126)
“For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 122)
“What I’ve found to be important is mainly just the realization that everyone has all knowledge and all humanity within themselves. Individual minds are connected to a universal mind. All people need to do is find out how to get it and reach it when they need it. Karma is simple truth: you reap what you sow.”
Willie Nelson, via Sunbeams (Page 143)