This is my new favorite thread!
@SunshineHug Aww ... that one can be so sad and so true.
Thank you @JessArt88. 1st belly laugh of the day, and probably the week.
@MissAdventurous Thank you for the Grief Affirmations. So good.
“Don’t die with your music still inside you” -Wayne Dyer
“Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love.” – Rumi
Sometimes you’re the cat, sometimes you’re the hairball.
Yesterday is past, tomorrow is the future, but today is a gift, that id why it us called the present ✨
Relevant at the moment, but also painful.
Rumi told us that the wound is the place where the light can enter. Khalil Gibran told us that out of suffering emerges the strongest souls, that the most massive characters are seared with scars. Marcus Aurelius told us that the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way. Napoleon Hill told us that every adversity, every failure, and every heartache carries with it the seeds of an equal or greater benefit.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross told us that the most beautiful people we have known are those “who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.”
That “beautiful people do not just happen.”
When Joseph Campbell outlined the hero’s journey for us, the premise was that at the moment of the deepest and most unmoving difficulty, the protagonist recognized that it was they who must change. That which seemed to derail the path was the pinnacle moment at which the true path was actually revealed.
In each case, the epiphany is that the presence of the challenge is the initiator. If we are lucky, our lives will continue to grow as we are presented with new paths, and various obstacles among them. To heal is not to arrive at a place where we are absolved of that difficulty, but where we no longer interpret the presence of it as our finality, our ending. Rather, we come to see it is as yet another beginning in support of the continual unfolding of all we will one day know ourselves to be.
In a world where most of us die before we are dead, where most of us hyper-fixate on what we cannot control and leave to ruins everything that we can, where most of us fear our humanness and our vulnerability — I hope you find the courage to try. I hope you will come to see that just maybe, beneath the journey you fear to take is the life you had been waiting for, all along.