“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.”
Heidi Priebe, This Is Me Letting You Go
“You are richer than 93 percent of people. Not in money, but in time. Over 108 billion people have lived throughout history. 93 percent of them are dead. You have what every king and queen, every pharaoh and ruler, every CEO and celebrity of the past would give all their wealth and power for: Today.”
James Clear
“People commonly assume that each passing second brings them closer to death; but this is largely and dangerously fallacious. The second in which a drowning man grabs hold of a life preserver or a starving man is offered a bowl of soup does not bring either closer to death but, rather, sharply away from it. People who undergo healthy conversions of habit cut abruptly away from death; wholesome exercise, from a physiological point of view, is not necessarily motion toward death at all. To say that such actions or activities merely delay death is a kind of sophistry; for since death is, in physical terms, a negative state, it is much more pertinent and correct to say that they prolong and increase life. Indeed, time has much less to do with death—for death is, as a cessation of motion, also a cessation of time—than it has to do with life, its most complex embodiment. Thinking that time brings death is less a workable assumption than a moral evasion, an example of our chronic tendency to ascribe our woes and weaknesses to external circumstances rather than to living will.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 118)
“Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings.”
Anthony de Mello
“Relationships are usually the most important thing. If you want to achieve more, there is some relationship that can unlock better results. If you want to make a meaningful contribution, helping others is a great way to do it. If you simply want to be a little happier, life is often more fun when shared with someone. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, relationships are probably the key to getting there. Take this idea seriously and spend a little time thinking about which relationships you need to build or invest in.”
James Clear
“Things don’t give us anxiety—we bring our anxiety to things. Think about it. What do all the things that make you anxious have in common? You. You are the common ingredient in all of them. That’s why Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations that he doesn’t escape his anxiety—he discards it because it’s within him. It’s the fault of his perceptions, nothing outside himself.”
Ryan Holiday
“Commonly old age brings on retirement from work; but in many cases it is truer to say that retirement brings on old age. The mind, like any other organ, retains and renews its strength only through exercise. In active life, whatever its negative stresses and trials, this exercise is emotional as well as rational, creative as well as defensive. The demands of communal effort constitute an irreplaceable exercise of mind, as does the state of being responsible or the state of being needed, no matter what the responsibility or the need. In retirement we lose these healthy activities, and the freedom we gain is often a poor exchange for the enervating vacuum of challenge, the dry rot of immobility which leaves us, month by month, less supple, less responsive and less vigorous. And even worse than this, to the extent that in active life we have established our own identity as social beings, we. become in retirement less and less ourselves.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 117)
“The idea of my own advancing age has never particularly bothered me, perhaps because my youthful years were much less enjoyable than the time I have now. But today, prompted by some new ache or wrinkle, my mind glanced onto the subject, and I was briefly invaded by a curious feeling. It was the same sort of mood that is cultivated by writers of thrillers, experienced by heroes who, early in the story, are knocked out or drugged, and awake to find themselves in wholly unfamiliar places, damp moldering cellars or drab rooms whose barred windows look out on alien courtyards, far from where the heroes’ friends or colleagues expect them to be, far from where they or anyone would want to be. They feel dismay, confusion and impotent anger, and these were what I momentarily felt; but in my case the feeling did not concern place but rather time. I felt stranded in my forties, a young spirit in a withering body. For a few instants I refused to acknowledge my body as my own, denied the connection between awareness and the protoplasm from which it springs. It was not until later that I realized taht this refusal, this anger, was the real crux of aging: that the pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact taht part of us does not grow old.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 113)
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
Anne Lamott
“There are many elements of living a good life, but the first and most foundational is to love yourself and enjoy spending time with yourself. Go do things on your own so you learn to trust your mind and view it as a welcome companion. If someone declared, ‘Tomorrow you must spend the day alone’ the hope is that you would reply, ‘That sounds like a good day!’ The person who is at ease within finds every other space larger and more enjoyable.”
James Clear
“An ordinary teacher weights and bags ideas like potatoes; a skilled teacher makes them open up like flowers from a bud.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 109)
“One thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
“Be forgiving with your past self. What’s done is done. Take the lessons with you and release the guilt. Be strict with your present self. Win the moment in front of you right now. Be flexible with your future self. There are many paths to success. You don’t need life to be a certain way to live well.”
James Clear
“The greatest enemy of love is attachment. Why? Because it tries to disguise itself as love. There is a similarity between closeness and clinging that easily confuses the mind. A well- fed connection between two people can create a nurturing feeling of closeness while a fear of loss or craving to control creates the type of clinging that tries to grasp another person with tension. Closeness can foster a relationship, while clinging can stifle a relationship and drain it of love.”
Yung Pueblo
“Writing is a byproduct of hours and hours of reading, researching, thinking and making my notecards. When a day’s writing goes well, it’s got little to do with that day at all. It’s actually a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking. Every passage and page has a prologue titled Preparation.”
Ryan Holiday