Excerpt: These 25 Quotes from The Gift Of A Year will replenish your soul and put the emphasis of your focus back to where it’s most important—on you.
“Every couple of years a farmer lets his fields go fallow so the soil can replenish itself. Why should we be any different?”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 127)
“We all need a time and place for ourselves where the walls of our usual lives disappear. Sometimes taking yourself out of the hypnotic context of your everyday life is the only way to begin to be able to listen to the still voice within. When you do, listen carefully. Listen for the ways you whisper to yourself, ‘This is who I really am. This is what I need. This is what I want to do.’ When you hear new whisperings about these things, your gift of a year has rescued some lost piece of yourself and made it possible for you to put more of the you back in your life.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 110)
The French have an expression: Reculer pour mieux sauter. This means that you have to step back, retreat a little, if you’re going to successfully jump over something. Want to jump across a ditch? You don’t just walk to the edge and then leap. You walk to the edge, gauge the distance, and then retreat a bit to give yourself room to get a full running start before you leap. Sometimes we can’t take the next leap forward unless we take the time to step back first. Where will you get the strength to sauter (leap forward) if you can’t allow yourself to reculer (pull back)?”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 87)
Keep moving forward is the motto, yes. But, how to move forward if you walked yourself up to a ditch (as is often the case in life)? Moving forward in that case is to fall into the ditch and get stuck (or worse). So, as Kirshenbaum illustrates above, we move backwards so that we can gain the strength and momentum needed to run and jump over the ditch. In other words, sometimes the best way to keep moving forward is to move backwards, first.
Read More »Mira Kirshenbaum Quote on Retreating Back So That You Can Keep Moving Forward in Life“You need to find out what juices your batteries. You need to do more to a battery than simply leave it alone to fill it up with electricity again. You have to fill it with what it needs. To recharge spiritually, you need to put yourself into a new context where you can get new answers. That way you can get plugged in to something that has the power you need.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 91)
“Recreation doesn’t just mean enjoying yourself. It literally means re-creating yourself. It’s almost a way of taking yourself apart and putting yourself back together again so that you feel better and function better. And so that you’ve worked out some of the glitches in your system.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 88)
“Rest doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means lying fallow, and that means restoring the nutrition you’ve lost. It’s about building yourself up. Reculer means retreating so you can advance. And retreating carries with it all the implications of a religious retreat—a way to spend energy to get more energy.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 88)
“It’s easy to get started giving yourself the gift of a year. You start by giving yourself the gift of empty bits of time. Can you give yourself one whole Saturday or Sunday every week free from commitments? Can you give yourself half an hour just for you every morning or evening? Can you steal half an hour from work every day? Can you get your boss/husband/boyfriend/mother/kids/friends to cut you some slack?”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 34)
Book Overview: Whether you think of it as a treat or a lifesaver, if you give yourself the gift of a year, it will change your life. This book will show you how to give yourself the gift of a year, piece by piece, step by step. As one woman put it, “Nothing could be simpler. For one year you do something that makes you feel great about yourself and your life.” If you’d like guidance, you’ll get everything you need here. If you need help seeing what you want to do with your special year, you’ll get that. If you need help seeing why you’re entitled to give yourself an entire year, you’ll get that. And if you need help with practical issues, like how to find time or ensure you get everything you want from your year, you’ll get that, too. This is a book about women and how we live our lives today. How we really feel about ourselves. How the way we live can drain the ‘you’ from your life, and how important it is to take care of yourself and to fill your life with more of what truly matters to you.
Buy from Amazon! Not on Audible…
Not enough time to read entire books? Check out Blinkist and get the key insights from popular nonfiction books in a fraction of the time. ‘Busy’ isn’t an excuse.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“Over the course of 20 seasons, I suffered my fair share of serious injuries. The first thing I always thought about in those situations was, ‘What do I need to do to get back to 100 percent?’ That was my mindset. I never let fear or doubt seep into my psyche. I never whined and I never complained. I mean, for what?”
Kobe Bryant, Mamba Mentality (Page 172)
“Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”
Franz Kafka, via Daily Rituals
It never ceases to amaze me how fast 10 minutes goes by when I’m distracted and busy versus how slow 10 minutes goes by when I’m trying to be present. Even just this morning I was reminded. My alarm went off at around 7:15am and after snoozing for another 15 minutes, I went on my phone to further wake up for the day. Before I knew it, it was already 8:10am. 40 minutes had literally flown by before I had even one conscious thought to check the time.
Read More »Franz Kafka Quote on Using Subtle Maneuvers to Stay Balanced and Focused As You Continue To Fight in Life“[Leisure] is a physical state—a physical action—that somehow replenishes and strengthens the soul. Leisure is not the absence of activity, it is activity. What is absent is any external justification—you can’t do leisure for pay, you can’t do it to impress people. You have to do it for you.“
Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 237)
Too often we associate “replenishing” and “recharging” with shutting down and binging. We finish a long stretch of work and we immediately resort to plopping down in front of the TV and mindlessly zoning out for a few hours to “recover.” And while it is okay to do that every now and again, what might be worth exploring is the idea of recharging, not by checking out, but by checking in to activities that engage you.
Read More »Ryan Holiday Quote on Leisure and Recharging Constructively“People say, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ as they hasten that very death, both literally and figuratively. They trade their health for a few more working hours. They trade the long-term viability of their business or their career before the urgency of some temporal crisis. If we treat sleep as a luxury, it is the first to go when we get busy. If sleep is what happens only when everything is done, work and others will constantly be impinging on your personal space. You will feel frazzled and put upon, like a machine that people don’t take care of and assume will always function.”
Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 230)
“Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience.”
Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 225)
“Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.”
Ashleigh Brilliant
If you’re at the point of burnout, that doesn’t mean that you’re just physically tired or that you’re mentally fatigued… being burned out means that your body has shut down because all of your domains of energy have been depleted—physical, mental, and emotional. And when your body shuts down, you have no choice but to listen.
Read More »Ashleigh Brilliant Quote on the Vital Importance of Rest“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes… Including you.”
Anne Lamott
Following through on a commitment is something that you can choose to do or choose not to do. Burning out is something that happens—it’s not something that you can choose against. When there’s no more gas in the car, you can’t choose to magically have more gas with the snap of your fingers—you need a gas station for that. When there’s no more battery juice left in your phone, you can’t choose to boost your battery life with positive thinking—you need a charging cable for that. When there’s no more energy left inside you—mental, physical, or emotional—you can’t demand more energy to appear through even the most disciplined thinking—you need rest, recover, and self-care for that.
Read More »Anne Lamott Quote on Unplugging and the Reality of Burnout“Whatever you’re feeling, be good to yourself. If you feel lost, be patient with yourself while you find your way. If you feel scared, be gentle with yourself while you find the strength to face your fear. If you feel hurt, be kind to yourself while you grieve and slowly heal. You can’t bully yourself into clarity, courage, or peace, and you can’t rush self-discovery or transformation. Some things simply take time, so take the pressure off and give yourself space to grow.”
Lori Deschene
“We never really get over our traumas, and as much as we heal, scars will remain. That doesn’t mean we need to view those scars as reminders of our injuries; instead, we can see them as proof of our resilience.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 30)
“Remember that you also need rest, so schedule that in. Listen to your body, sneak in those ten- to twenty-minute power naps when necessary, and take one full rest day per week. If it’s a rest day, truly allow your mind and body to relax. Turn your phone off. Keep the computer shut down. A rest day means you should be relaxed, hanging with friends or family, and eating and drinking well, so you can recharge and get back at it. It’s not a day to lose yourself in technology or stay hunched at your desk in the form of a damn question mark.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
