One reason people resist change is because they focus on what they have to give up, instead of what they have to gain. ... author unknown
@Mike403 🤣🤣🤣
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. ~Matt Haig
Book: The Midnight Library
(Art: Painting by Douglas Gray)
No one has their shit together. We're all just stumbling around trying the best we can with what we have available to us. The goal of life is not to perfect every element. The goal of life is to not die. If you made it through the day and achieved that, then you are a winner!
From Leo Tolstoy's Three questions:
"Remember then: there is only one time that is important – now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary person is the one with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else: and the most important affair is to do that person good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life.”
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation.
The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world.
The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence.
The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm… There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance. ~Alain de Botton
(Art: Photograph of Paul Newman and wife Joanne Woodward shopping for books in Paris 1959 by Gordon Parks)
"Tennessee sent you to ask if he had mattered. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't send someone to ask if I mattered: I go out myself and ask, through my actions, if I matter, if I'm helping, if I can do anything, if I've earned another day on the planet.
That's where Tennessee and I were different. Loved the man, and God knows I understand the question, but never in a million years would I have asked it of someone else or sent someone to ask it. You have to show up to matter, and you have to ask the hard questions yourself."--Elizabeth Taylor
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scott Prior - Cabin with Two Towels.
"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me…So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…" Aldous Huxley - Island, 1962.
Josef Váchal - Pilgrimage of Little Elves, 1911.