self

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps

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almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not ... See more

When you define yourself around an identity label you forfeit your ability to self-govern and to discern what you genuinely believe from what others tell you to believe. By defining your self around an identity label, you necessarily allow said label to supersede your self. Most importantly, this identity-first approach (i.e., viewing yourself and ... See more

The mismatch between past and present doesn’t seem trivial to me — if the “you” of today can so blithely disregard the “you” of yesterday, then it follows that the “you” I’m talking to now might very well not be the one who shows up for our date tomorrow. There’s a kind of unpredictable change that seems to lie outside of the virtues of growth and ... See more

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. This is the kernel of wisdom in the cliché of the celebrity who claims that a brush with cancer was “the best thing that ever happened” to them: it pitches them into a more authentic mode of bein... See more

Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore yo... See more

We all live multiple lives in one, and our sense of self continuously dies in the process. So when you feel some fundamental changes occurring within you (i.e. feeling disconnected from certain friends, being discontent with a job you’ve historically enjoyed, questioning your faith, etc.), don’t be too afraid.

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and

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The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it ... See more