Focusing on inner peace can give you stability, adaptability, maturity, self-awareness, mental clarity, better decision-making, the power of choice instead of impulsiveness and much more, but it does not give you an external environment that no longer has challenges or a mind that is void of all negativities.
Yung Pueblo
“Our days and our lives are pathetically shortened by miscellaneous abuses and confusions of time. We are novices at the art of making plans and have trouble remembering the plans we have made. We ignore the time that is open to us. We diminish ourselves by wishing time to pass. We are, for the most part, incapable of real concentration. Our days are broken by distraction, scrambled up into muddles of chores, errands, impulses, evasions, interruptions and delays, besotted with routine. We characteristically fail to see the ways in which a given period can be expanded, deepened and slowed by the exercise of will and awareness. Deprived of this power and isolated from continuity, we often feel small, momentary, almost transparent, like paper-thin façades of being.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 20)
“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis
“Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby’s conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 7)
“Intentionally create a loving relationship between you and yourself. How you treat yourself can easily become how you treat your partner. Loving another person is greatly shaped by how strong your self-love is. The way you accept yourself, talking to yourself gently in your mind, not forcing yourself to be perfect, all the ways that you activate your self-love, will end up framing the shape of your relationship.”
Yung Pueblo
“Rooms can be vessels of psychologoical temporality, silently encouraging specific attitudes toward time: The furniture of the past: shelved books, dried flowers, windows facing west, antiques, old photographs and paintings, lamplight, miscellaneous articles, complicated space. The furniture of the present: chairs and tables chosen for utility, a bowl of fruit, an open book, current periodicals, windows to the south, overhead lights, cut flowers or potted plants, modern art, mirrors. The furniture of the future: bare walls, a skylight, windows facing east, much open space, a barometer, clear desk, sharpened pencils, blank pad, unopened book, unopened bottle of wine, skylights, light colors, large doorless openings to other rooms.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 6)
