Most people – maybe more than you think – are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.
“That means seeing people with generous eyes, offering tr... See more
"You can choose peace in every moment of your life. We have been taught to believe that when we don’t get what we want, or things aren’t unfolding as we had thought they should, that’s bad and thus we should feel badly. This struggling against what is, this inability or unwillingness to love what is, is the source of all of our suffering and it is entirely our own creation. With practice, we can become as masterful at choosing peace as we have become at choosing anything else."
We’re meant to experience emotional pain so we can release it. No other reason.
What I’m in search of is maybe hard to explain in a neat sentence, but, maybe, it’s some sense of resonance. You know when you’re reading and you’re like “Oh, this person is saying this thing I’ve been thinking or feeling forever, but didn’t know how to express in words?” That’s a beautiful feeling when you can see yourself more clearly through som... See more
“Specificially, pursuit of novelty creates “luck”, and curiosity is the emotional manifestation of novelty. If we’re more open to what attracts our attention, we’ll get a lot luckier.”
If you haven’t stepped out of your comfort zone in a while, it might be time to try.
Experiencing the unfamiliar allows us to practice being agile, because we’re not always able to default to our usual cognitive response patterns in new contexts.