026
“Go the way your blood beats”
You don’t need to justify who you are—you have nothing to prove. If you aren’t living your life then whose life are you living? Gather yourself in your entirety and live faithfully to the truth of your experiences. No matter what other people might say, the world belongs to you just as much as it belongs to everyone else.
025
“...and the child then feels that the reason for her (mother’s) apparent refusal to accept his love is that his own love is destructive and bad...(the child) feels that his love is bad because it appears destructive towards his libidinal objects”
It is not enough for a mother to love her child; she needs to accept the way her child expresses their love. When a child’s unique expressions are met with rebuff or indifference, the child feels shame and learns to hide their real self. This is the origin of the development of the false self—or the under functioning real self.
024
“A Japanese woman once told me a traditional proverb. It went something like: a small amount of dust collected over a lifetime makes a mountain. Small steps taken many times, accumulate and lead to significant change—that’s how you get there”
It’s hard to be patient. We want change and transformation to happen dramatically with one potent insight, wake-up call, or breakthrough, but more often, change happens incrementally, slowly, barely perceptible to the eye. You probably don’t look that much different today as you did yesterday or how you will look tomorrow but ten years from now, changes will be visible. Making gradual shifts and taking small steps takes commitment and perseverance in the face of setbacks, regressions, confusions, and standstills. Knowing something intellectually is one thing but embodying the understanding is another—this is the work of a lifetime.
023
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”
There is a difference between knowledge and knowing. We live in a society that privileges knowledge over knowing and in some circles, knowing over knowledge; feelings over knowledge. But knowledge and knowing need to go together. Perhaps, Intuition is the integration of knowledge and knowing. It is an ability to get into sync in a full-bodied way, not just with our heads and feelings but our whole self. Intuition depends on the fullness of our being and fills the gap between our knowledge, our unconscious, and our actions—it is guiding force in life. So, listen. Listen carefully. And above all, listen to your whole self.
022
“…I believe, generally, all persons must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and…(all) that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, that we may shape our art”
Everything in life can be used to deepen and widen our growth, understanding, and empathy. Transforming our experiences is inherently creative—we can throw rubbish into a bin or pick it up and turn it into an artwork; it depends on your courage to see more, to see beyond what meets the eye.
021
“Love, but be careful what you love”
And be careful who you love. Choose someone who is good for you—the person you are with your history, vulnerabilities, and values. Who and what you love can deplete or strengthen you in ways you didn’t know; so, choose your loves from a sincere outpour of who you are rather than from hunger, grasping, or ego. In many ways, who and what and how you love becomes who you are.
020
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love”
Rilke wrote this while dying from leukaemia. There is nothing like death to bring us into the present moment with such painful clarity. It is by grace and random chance that any one of us exists at all, so don’t squander your life with constant escapism. In the words of Soren Kierkegaard, ‘(of) all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy—to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.’ Don’t rush. Don’t be “productive”. Death would tell you: be intentional, take care in what you do, and savour every moment, living as if everything and everyone might not be here tomorrow.
019
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love”
The more you can accept and understand yourself, the more you can accept and understand another person. If your ability to accept yourself is limited, your ability to offer understanding and tolerance toward another person will also be limited. You might choose to respond to anger with anger; an eye for an eye. Kevin Kelly said ‘whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind, be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness’. But our capacity to make this compassionate choice is only as wide and as big as our capacity to know and inhabit and put our arms around our own complicated multiplicity.
018
“Walker, there is no road
The road is made by walking”
There is no point to speculating what will happen—it’s a waste of precious time. We don’t know what will happen; the future is unknown to us. Simply put one foot in front of the other, do the next thing that seems most necessary, and the future will come into being itself.
017
“I have no power over you that you don’t give me, and you have no power over me that I don’t give you…Your greatest creation is yourself. Like any great work of art, creating a great self means putting in hard work, every day, for years”
A commitment to yourself, your values, ideas, and integrity is the most important thing in life, for embodying who you are, answering only to your deeper truths, is what gives you existential security and freedom; your personhood can stay in tact from injury, attack, and assault.
016
“Forgiving…is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven”
Forgiving is not to absolve abuse, violence, or bad behaviour, but to free yourself from the incessant need of those who hurt you to make amends, which may never come. Forgiving is the difficult process of coming-to-terms-with what happened, and to learn to live with what happened, for unmourned grievances stop you from living. Forgiving is for-giving, not debt-collecting, and this transforms the meaning and consequences of the injustice.
015
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”
You can’t make someone into who you want them to be. Relationships, of all kinds, require a capacity to relate; and you can only relate if you know yourself deeply enough to let other people be free to be who they are. Persuading, manipulating, or working hard to get other people to understand you, see you, respond to your needs or have your way, is control and a one-person point of view. Love is not only a feeling but an ongoing commitment to care just as much for another person as for yourself, and to care just as much for yourself as another person. And as the words of Iris Murdoch suggest, one could apply this understanding of love to our relationship with our environment and to all living creatures—if you matter, so does everything else.
014
“Here’s how to break through the perfectionism: make a LOT of mistakes…celebrate messes—these are where the goods are…500 people may tell you that you are bitter, delusional and boring. Let me ask you this: in the big scheme of things, who fucking cares?”
We waste so much time and energy worrying about what other people think. The most sad waste happens when this worry stops us from living life: not putting your art in the world out of worry that it’s not good enough, not swimming in the ocean out of worry that your thighs are too big, or not telling someone that you love them out of fear of rejection. We don’t find time for what matters, we make time; what we need to find in ourselves is the courage to live our priorities and in doing so, our lived priorities become our destiny.
013
“Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy…actualising a concept of what they should be like rather than actualising their potentiality as a human being”
Personal authenticity gives meaning to life, for being real creates real connections. Being ashamed of who you are makes you look to others to tell you who you are. You put on a mask, and as George Orwell wrote in his essay ‘Shooting An Elephant’, you grow into the mask. But it’s a false self, and this fills you with shame. There is an existential sense of insecurity when we stand alone as our real selves, but we are not alone when we imitate or conform. Learning to activate and actualise our real selves is one of life’s hardest and most valuable lessons.
012
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night...I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be... apparitions all the more insistent for being so long banished. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch”
The knocking and hammering on the mind’s door is what Sigmund Freud meant by repression. Melanie Klein expanded on this idea with the unconscious psychic action of splitting—putting all the unwanted parts of ourselves, elsewhere. The antidote to neurosis is self-acceptance, which is to let in and acknowledge with compassion and forgiveness all of who we are, and all of who we have been.
011
“In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with the brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it…many big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself”
We transform, not only our lives but who we are, by living IN life and learning from our experiences. We cannot know whether something is going to be a loss or a gain until we have taken the plunge and experienced the choices we made. We can stay in boxes by wanting answers that cannot be given, or we can stay true to the givens of our lives; and in the experiencing, develop a deep, personal knowledge that keeps us luminous and connected to ourselves, one another, and to life itself. As Joanna Field said, “I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it”
010
“And so my advice to all...do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn’t. It’s the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel”
Imprisoning yourself through avoidance and hiding who you are, or blowing up your life through domination and control, is the easy path. It takes little effort to destroy a life or live in a box or let fear take the lead. It takes courage and hard work to live freely; it means willingness to take the risk of being open, vulnerable, emotionally honest, living your life as your whole, true self in all its plurality. It means having hard, kind, respectful conversations in the service of care and deepening intimacy. It’s the hardest work. You have to ‘feel and work and fight till you die’ but the ‘most wonderful life on earth’ is to be free
009
“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending...It says the world is worth believing in”
You can feel absolutely devastated about a situation but do not assume this predicts what will happen. And do not think that value and success lie in a desired outcome; do what you believe in because it matters to you and your sense of humanity. Hope entails a commitment to finding many possibilities, even when it seems impossible to find one.
008
“People with self-respect exhibit…a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self respect springs”
Self-respect is built by the willingness to take responsibility for being yourself, even if this means being misunderstood, alone, judged, rejected, or marginalised. In a world filled with many voices that are happy to tell you who you are, it takes discipline and courage to have faith in yourself. You are not comprised of public opinion, and if you strive to live up to someone else’s view of you, you will be an imitation—a false self rather than a true self. Taking full custodianship of who you are is ‘the source from which self respect springs’. Nothing is more important than being yourself.
007
“…fact checking and commitment to accuracy even in your personal conversation—is resistance and it matters”
Many of us do not know the power any one of us has on another human being, but once known, one must act with responsibility in our words; in our language with people if we are to conserve and further our humanity. In a careless world where lies are believed just as much as truth, taking the time to take care about the honesty of our words, language, and actions is an act of resistance. And we must keep doing this, again and again.