“There’s a time in every kid’s life when they’re still drawing every day and playing basketball every day. Then there’s a day when they stop drawing and keep playing basketball. They keep playing basketball because their parents do, and their parents don’t draw. At some point they’re like, ‘That can’t be cool because my parents don’t do it.’ You don’t think you’re cool, but if your kid says, ‘Dad, will you play with me?’ and you say, ‘Not now, I’m drawing,’ that kid is going to start drawing because that’s cool to them.”
Mo Willems
Archives
Don’t leave your masterpiece unfinished.
(Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)
“I don’t praise a small child for doing what they ought to be able to do. I praise them when they do something really difficult—like sharing a toy or showing patience. I also think it is important to say ‘thank you.’ When I’m slow in getting a snack for a child, or slow to help them and they have been patient, I thank them. But I wouldn’t praise a child who is playing or reading.”
Charlotte Stiglitz, via The Examined Life (Page 21)
“Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories like this—stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us—we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 10)
“Change and loss are deeply connected—there cannot be change without loss.”
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page xii)
“Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.”
George A. Sheehan, via Sunbeams (Page 52)
“You are here to aid in the great expansion of consciousness. You are not here to cry about the miseries of the human condition but to change them when you do not find them to your liking through the joy, strength, and vitality that is within you; to create the spirit as faithfully and beautifully as you can in flesh.”
Jane Roberts, The Nature Of Personal Reality, via Sunbeams (Page 52)
“It might make you feel good to dominate the conversation and make it all about you, but how do you think it is for everyone else? Do you think people are really enjoying the highlights of your high school football days? Is this really the time for another exaggerated tale of your sexual prowess? Try your best not to create this fantasy bubble—live in what’s real. Listen and connect with people, don’t perform for them.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 76)
“I believe that every man and woman represents humanity. We are different as to intelligence, health, talents. Yet we are all one. We are all saints and sinners, adults and children, and no one is anyone’s superior or judge. We have all been awakened with the Buddha, crucified with Christ, and we have all killed and robbed with Genghis Khan, Stalin, and Hitler. I believe that man can visualize the experience of the whole universal man only by realizing his individuality and never by trying to reduce himself to an abstract, common denominator. Man’s task in life is the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it to arrive at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed self can drop the ego.”
Erich Fromm, via Sunbeams (Page 51)
“A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and industries mend their ways.”
Wendell Berry, via Sunbeams (Page 51)
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
Herman Melville, via Sunbeams (Page 51)
“Remember: even what we get for free has a cost, if only in what we pay to store it—in our garages and in our minds. As you walk past your possessions today, ask yourself: Do I need this? Is it superfluous? What’s this actually worth? What is it costing me?”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 75)
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves [Book]
Book Overview: An extraordinary book for anyone eager to understand the hidden motives that shape our lives. In his work as a practicing psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behavior. The Examined Life distills more than fifty thousand hours of conversation into pure psychological insight without the jargon. This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening, and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to the analyst as to the patient. These are stories about our everyday lives; they are about the people we love and the lies we tell, the changes we bear and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but also how we might find ourselves.
Buy from Amazon! Listen on Audible!
Great on Kindle. Great Experience. Great Value. The Kindle edition of this book comes highly recommended on Amazon.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“Whatever the next thing is I write, it’s got to be even more naked than the last.”
Harold Pinter, via Sunbeams (Page 50)
“Two things come to mind that are euphoric for me. One is the universal euphoric: sex, that period of time when you are at an absolute peak of sexual feeling. The other is when I create something that moves me. When I am the audience to my own creation and I’m moved. If it were a drug and I could buy it, I’d spend all my money on it.”
Paul Simon, via Sunbeams (Page 50)
“The person is free who lives as they wish, neither compelled, nor hindered, nor limited—whose choices aren’t hampered, whose desires succeed, and who don’t fall into what repels them. Who wishes to live in deception—tripped up, mistaken, undisciplined, complaining, in a rut? No one. These are base people who don’t live as they wish; and so, no base person is free.”
Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 74)