“Because work has temporal structure, we unconsciously associate leisure with temporal disorganization. And over this deadening rhythm is played, again and again, the same psychological bolero: Monday, the Day of Wrath; Tuesday and Wednesday, the grind; weary Thursday, across whose fallowness Friday, a prostitute-goddess of inexplicably renewable freshness, beckons with a promise of unspecified fulfillment. This promise is based on the lie that human nature, unfulfilled by work, can be fulfilled by leisure. Of course the promise is never kept; we spend Saturday and Sunday consecrating the week’s successes and failures to oblivion, in deepening dread of the Monday to come.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 156)
“The years forget our errors and forgive our sins, but they punish our inaction with living death.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 128)
“Thus at the beginnings of things it is well to treat ourselves to a luxury of blankness, to go into each day’s work without the deadening burdens of continuity, consistency and fixed purpose. Don’t look back; you will have time enough for that during later stages. At this point the essential things are amplitude, variety, boldness, imagination. Contradictions are not only allowable but essential; for without them you will almost always fail to transcend your initial understanding.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 122)
“Achievements like the writing of books, the painting of pictures, and indeed all long and cumulative indivisual efforts, are greater than the individuals who produce them, if we view these individuals at any single point in time. For no one can in a single moment recall the multitude of shapes his mind took during the course of the work, or revive the various intensisties of passion and calm which injected themselves into its production, or glow with the incremental power built up by weeks or months of care. The work resembels not the partial man, alone within the minutes, but the whole man, incorporate in time.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 122)
“Borrowed wisdom breaks under pressure because you haven’t earned it. You’re trusting someone else’s compression without knowing what created it. Earned wisdom, on the other hand, holds up because it’s rooted in your actual experience. You know when it works, why it works, when to ignore it and when to bend it because you created the compression.”
Shane Parrish
“I realized that I have been living for the emotional scraps of approval—not from strangers, but from my husband. He loves slow, lazy Sundays; I love Sundays that feed me—meditation, a run, reading, a workshop. To keep the peace, I’ve been bending toward his rhythm: cramming ‘me’ into Saturday and then drifting through Sunday beside him. The cost has been a low-grade guilt and the quiet ache of self-abandonment; I end too many weekends disappointed in myself.
So I’m recalibrating. I’m not asking him to change; I’m choosing to keep one promise to myself before I keep any to anyone else. ‘Me-First Sundays’ start now: 7–11 AM are mine—long meditation, a run, a chapter, and one learning block—then shared downtime together. I want my weekends to end with pride, not apology. I choose aliveness over approval.”
Shruti, via The Secret To Resilience
“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)