💭 Things to return to

And listen, not to get too existential, but that’s sort of all there is to this whole being alive thing, right? We are on Earth for a while. We occupy certain spaces. We meet a bunch of people and make a bunch of decisions that impact both those people and a whole lot of others whom we’ll never meet. And through it all, we get the choice of making... See more

garrett bucks • The greatest saints in the world

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way... See more

Adam Mastroianni • So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself

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.

Cheryl Strayed • Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Allowing and encouraging a quality of play and experimentation in practice is vital, and vitalizing. I can’t emphasize this enough. Usually that’s how we learn best as human beings, and it keeps things from getting rigid and feeling heavy.

Rob Burbea • Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“I don’t think we talk enough about the in betweens. The part when you know you want to change something but don’t yet know how, don’t yet feel strong enough, don’t yet know what your first step is. So to the people in the in betweens, don’t be disheartened, don’t give up. You’ve done the hard part. Now just take it one small step at a time.
– allyi

It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.

Maria Popova • Of Stars, Seagulls, and Love: Loren Eiseley on the First and Final Truth of Life

Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming.

Glennon Doyle • Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living: THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

With that great countercultural courage of defying cynicism, Eiseley insists that it was the humans who nourished the highest in their nature by means of love, who lived with such exquisite tenderness for life in all of its expressions, that propelled our species from the caves to the cathedrals, from savagery to sonnets.