how i want to live my life

“If you want a new world, start making it right now, in whatever you are doing.” This is the best advice I ever had, it came from Brian Eno. If you imagine the world you would like to be in and start making objects, systems and collaborations that belong to that world, that world comes into being.

Lombard was more sophisticated than Bow, but she had the same bald enthusiasm for life: “I love living,” she declared. “Eating, sleeping, and waking up again, skeet shooting, sitting around an old barn doing nothing, my work, taking a bath, talking my ears off, the little things, the big things, the simplest things, the most complicated things — I... See more

These love stories — these friendships, these little nothing moments — this is the highest form of worship, of love.

I liked mattering. I can live with less money and with “regular” cars and without a job title ... it’s very possible to live a very nice life without those things. But mattering ... yeah, I miss that. I want to figure out how to matter again1. Let’s put a pin in that one, consider it a work in progress.

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather:

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What’s clarifying is that I do believe every person is important. That means working on a human scale matters. Things don’t feel small and petty if you really believe every life is precious and fully linked to all life on Earth. I may not be religious, but I hold community as sacred all the same.

Essentially it’s about finding yourself exciting, stimulating and worth exploring.

And then of course, the drastic changes will come in your life. Even if that just means adding a recurring dance class to your routine.

We create our own reason to live, not a meaning to life. If life has no meaning, it is entirely up to us to determine how we want to live, what purpose we want to fulfill. As Jean Paul Sartre would put it, we define our existence by determining our own essence, or the things that make us us. It is also up to us to grapple with the terrors that come... See more