self relationship

Relationships are like gazing into clear, bottomless pools of water. Look hard enough and you’ll meet the eyes of your own reflection. Stare into the soul of someone else long enough, and you’ll fall deeper into the abyss of yourself. The more you love the person in front of you, the more you understand yourself.

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how t... See more

So many high-achieving people get trapped into obsessing about the external world and neglecting their internal world. When you’ve been suppressing things for so long, you can’t just decide to stop all at once. Learning to listen to yourself takes a long time. I used to think that I always had to justify everything to myself—that I needed to be com

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Many people, me included, ask the question ‘what is it like to be me’ surprisingly infrequently. Asking yourself this, a lot, can stop you from falling into a bunch of varieties of self-destruction, and lead you towards a more self-authored and less self-inflicted life.

First, you possess imperfect knowledge of yourself. You may think you want something up until the moment you’ve attained it, only to discover that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting .

Second, you possess even more imperfect knowledge of who you will be in the future. Consider, for a moment, what your life today would be if you were to dictate its future contours precisely and completely at the age of ten. Absurd!

Instead of looking outwards to others and society for answers, I began to look within. I started to reconnect with my body. I began to garden. I shifted from a mindset of competition to one of cultivation. I created space for things to unfold instead of ruthlessly planning my life and strategically designing every step.