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.
“Do you need to give yourself permission to do something big for your special year? Just imagine, as an alternative, spending the rest of your life being dragged behind the Great Dane of your overcommitments to others. For five minutes it’s cute. Over a lifetime, it destroys what’s best in you and what’s unique about you. If you don’t care about that, it’s too bad. Maybe they got you, all those voices working away from the time you were a little [child], trying to convince you that your only needs were to meet other people’s needs. But I think you do care. A lot.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 151)
“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 never lose the good parts of ourselves we really care about. All the parts of yourself you’re wanting to put back in your life are there waiting for you. The pain you feel comes from the way these missing parts of yourself slowly choke from lack of oxygen when they’re buried. All you have to do is identify what’s really missing. Then make sure you find room for it in your life.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 111)
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“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)
Excerpt: Inspired by a quote from Naval Ravikant, this post is about taking responsibility for your own life and depending less on others to do the “saving” for you. Doctors won’t make you healthy. Teachers won’t make you smart. Mentors won’t make you rich. It’s all up to YOU. Save yourself.
Excerpt: The story of two wolves. One is all things good. The other is all things bad. They both live inside. Which will win? The answer is in the tale…
“The people in your life are truly interested in your being happy. The confusing thing is that they don’t go around advertising this. Your boss, your kids, your husband mostly talk about how they need this and they need that from you. But when you’re unhappy, a part of their world collapses. So if you have to shuffle your priorities around and put someone last who’s been coming first, and some of the people in your life start giving you grief, just remember how happy they’ll be when you’re happy.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 37)
“I remember a long period when it seemed like all I did was bounce back and forth between my patients and my children. They all needed every ounce of what I had to give. I didn’t even feel I had time for my husband. It was as if I were surrounded by a wall of people who saw me as nothing more than the person who took care of them. Emotionally I didn’t feel I had room to breathe.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 34)
“There should be no sense of struggle or any risk of failure with the gift of a year. You’re doing something you’ve been wanting to do for a long time. It’s about pleasure, indulgence, self-care, nurturing yourself, giving to yourself. It’s about seizing the day for yourself so you can do something you’ve long wanted to do. It’s not about making something happen. It’s about letting something happen. It’s not about pushing. It’s about stopping pushing.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 25)
“When you make yourself a top priority in your life for one year, you prove to yourself forever that you’re free, not trapped. You prove that you own your life, instead of feeling that everyone else’s claims on you come first. You prove that you can take care of yourself. You change the way you feel about your life forever. So do it now: cut one big slice from the pie of life and give it to yourself.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 17)
“If you don’t give to yourself, you will suffer damage.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 16)
More specifically, if you don’t give to yourself some of your own time, energy, and effort—you will suffer damage. And we’re not talking about presents. You can live just fine without ever buying yourself superfluous gifts. What you can’t live “just fine” without, however, are the gifts of “you” time, the self-directed energy required for self-discovery and healing, and the personal effort it takes to overcome challenges and become your best you. If you only ever direct your time, energy, and effort towards others—where are you supposed to get the time, energy, and effort required to maintain, upgrade, and improve yourself?
Read More »Mira Kirshenbaum Quote on Self-Care and How Important It Is To Give To Yourself“Giving yourself the gift of a year has a magical impact on your life because it restores the natural, necessary balance between giving to yourself and giving to others. There’s no reason for you to leave yourself outside of the equation. In the ecology of your life, you’re as important as anyone. If things curdle inside of you because you’ve neglected yourself, then ultimately they curdle for everyone.”
Mira Kirshenbaum, The Gift of a Year (Page 10)
“How we deal with our inner world drives everything. Every aspect of how we love, how we live, how we parent and how we lead. The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic. We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving.”
Susan David, Ph.D, Mindful
As a result of people being in quarantine because of COVID-19, there have been two conversations that have been happening at large. One group has been pushing for productivity. The idea is to use all of this extra time to do more of that you felt you never had time to do before. Start that blog; write that book; lose that weight; create that website; become that person. The other group has been pushing for conscientious recovery. The idea is that this global pandemic has radically affected all of our lives and has redefined “normal.” We need to be taking this time to mindfully cope with all of new unknowns and pay close attention to our mental health during this global crisis. Both of these schools of thought should be carefully considered by everybody.
Read More »Susan David Quote on Having Emotional Agility and Staying Balanced in the Face of Complexity“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
