💭 Things to return to

Seriousness saddles the work with a burden. It misses the playful side of being human. The chaotic exuberance of being present in the world. The lightness of pure enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake.

Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The differenc

The path forward from here isn’t that complicated. You explore your defenses and your shame with a spirit of curiosity, and you give yourself more permission to be your soft, effusive self out in the open. If that feels like a lot, remember that merely grounding yourself in the moment is a start. You stop and breathe and forgive yourself for who yo

At first, these adaptations make it possible to survive. But eventually, the methods you used to feel comfortable and safe rendered you increasingly defended, shut down, prone to escapism, resistant to reality, anxious, avoidant, neurotic, narcissistic, depressed, hopeless. This is true because when you function through a series of defenses, fantas

When we were very young, our bodies told us that we could break through the constraints of the mundane world and seize a more colorful, wild life for ourselves. As we grew older, we caught glimpses of lives that looked more exciting and full of promise than ours, through a million shiny portholes, and we began to define joy as something that lived

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait.