“Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one’s teeth.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 59)
“The birth of our second child is one, maybe two weeks away. The coming event looms over us, the way a big wave looms over a little boat; and our days are dimmed by its shadow. The future can exert this force upon us, can totally suck the juice out of the present, turning it into something tense, dry, useless to memory. How can we enjoy or profit from usch a transitional state? The practical answer is ‘Don’t sit and wait; prepare.’ The subtler answer is that no period in life is more or less transitional than any other, had we only the power to understand each.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 41)
“The mind loves to jump to conclusions because it is more familiar with tension than with peace. If you want peace, you will ask for clear information instead of letting your mind run into half-truths and speculation. When you understand how empty thoughts are, they start to lose their power and control over your actions.”
Yung Pueblo
“To those of us who spend entire days, if not lifetimes, concentrating on a series of brief and insignificant things, the present has barely any meaning at all; we become tiny timorous things, caught in the inch of space between the ‘in’ box and the ‘out’ box. While we may share the common illusions about a mobile present and a free fuutre, we spend most of our lives housecleaning the past—maintaining commitments, counterbalancing errors, living up to expectations, mopping up our own postponements. In this sense, as in others, we shuffle backward into the future, unaware of our enslavement to time or of the simple freedom of new beginnings.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 39)
“Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 38)
“You have a day to spare and wish to use it well. You see yourself in a kind of compartment of time whose immediate walls are last night’s and tonight’s sleep. Look beyond these walls and back at the present from imaginary mirrors placed in the past and the future. Think of the choices and events which brought you where you are; think of what you once wished or expected to have achieved by this point. Imagine what you will think of this period some time in the future. Will you think or do anything today that is worthy of future memory? Try to make the present memorable; or, failing this, review daily what is important about the present period in your life. In so doing you will enrich time.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 26)
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)
“When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal… For in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.”
Hermann Hesse, via Siddhartha
“One way to stand out is to look for pockets of low competition. Wake up early—less traffic, fewer people. Go deeper or narrower in your field—less noise, more space. People are drawn to where it is crowded. Look for the quiet spaces inside your areas of interest. Excellence often hides at the edges.”
James Clear
“The Stoics remind us that everything has its compensation…if we choose to see it, if we choose to welcome it. The challenges we face as parents become our greatest teachers and guides. You’ll have moments at the dialysis center that years from now, you wouldn’t trade for anything. You’ll develop patience and resilience that you could have otherwise never imagined—and they will too. You’ll learn how to advocate for yourself and for them. You’ll come face to face with this thing called acceptance. You will understand what it means to love, to really love unconditionally.”
Ryan Holiday