Molly

She’s 9 years old now and, like my other kids, a constant source of both joy and worry. In the immediate shadow of that experience, I drank in the pleasure of being alive. I had about six months of solid euphoria. After that, it was an inevitable stepwise return to the everyday stuff of living. I went back to work, and life resumed. I accepted,... See more

RegieRoger RegieRoger 16hLiked by Molly Barthseems part of the whole attitude to tear everything down, rather than find things of value to build

But the lesson to be drawn isn’t that we’re doomed to chaos. It’s that you – unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws – potentially have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else.

Remember: the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them. It’s that you only have access to your own mind.

The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.

The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it . As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know , from our vantage point in the... See more

The advice you don’t want to hear is usually the advice you need .

It’s possible, instead, to make a game of gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at the gym. When you expect that an action will be accompanied by feelings of irritability, anxiety or boredom, it’s usually possible to let that feeling arise and fade, while doing the action anyway. The rewards come so quickly, in... See more

I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control.... See more