What I’m in search of is maybe hard to explain in a neat sentence, but, maybe, it’s some sense of resonance. You know when you’re reading and you’re like “Oh, this person is saying this thing I’ve been thinking or feeling forever, but didn’t know how to express in words?” That’s a beautiful feeling when you can see yourself more clearly through som... See more

Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.

The most control you can possibly have is how you choose to show up, and where you choose to put your energy. You show up, and then you let others do the same—exactly as they do, exactly as they are. You release expectations of how you want them to be for you. You just let them. In this process, you will be surprised, delighted, and disappointed. T... See more

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 t... See more

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We ar

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It’s helpful to think in terms of: it’s only play. We’re here to play. We’re here to have fun. And to use the feedback of, you know, sometimes failure is the thing you need to know to get to where you’re going. So if you try to solve a problem 10 ways and they all fail, you can either decide I’m a failure or you can decide, okay, I’m now 10 method

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Ambition is about living life as an art of devotion to the Process and Pattern, making reality more beautiful with your participation than it would be without it.

Back when I was feeling a imless and lost I used to read and reread something Cheryl Strayed wrote about writing: The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering abou... See more

There is this idea I return to all the time, talk about all the time, that comes from a quote by one of our late elders, Eddie Benton Banai. He said that to live an Anishinaabe life, to live according to our Seven Grandfather teachings, is to live a life where every footstep becomes a prayer. Isn’t that beautiful? You know how when you walk through... See more