life necessitates contradictions to ever recreate itself.

we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.

This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bo

“The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her incisive Augustine-lensed meditation on love and loss, and nowhere is our happiness more beset by fear than in our fear of change.

even now, fresh tears make my vision waltz, with loving grief

We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change

psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis wrote in his 1973 field guide to how people change

Storytelling, like ecosystems, needs diversity to thrive.

“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing."

-Rebecca Solnit

My body … in constant negotiation with the bodies of the world beyond me, at the shifting edges where my skin bleeds into others

Solnit poignantly describes: “We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence