In a culture with so much that’s given, it’s easy to see others with more than I and blame them for my shortcoming.
The day I became a man is when I stopped complaining so much and started acting to make myself better.
It hurt to accept my failings, but the power it gave me was well worth it.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death…ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
Content: James Baldwin
A lot of people try to counteract the ‘I am not good enough’ with ‘I am good enough.’
In other words, they take the opposite and they try to invest it. That still keeps the world at the level of polarities.
The art is to go behind the polarities. So the act is to go not to the world of: ‘I am good’ to counteract ‘I am bad,’ Or ‘I am lovable’ as opposed to ‘I am unlovable.’
But go behind it to ‘I am.’
I am. I am.
And ‘I am’ includes the fact that I do crappy things, and I do beautiful things.
And I am.
Ours is an old, old story with an interesting new wrinkle. Throughout most of our history, nothing — not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons — has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed.
The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically.
Here’s an idea: let’s get over ourselves, reduce our carbon footprint, adopt an animal from a shelter, go buy a cherry pie, and fall in love with life.
-Tom Robbins in an interview by Tony Vigorito
When you’re doing something significant, your paycheck doesn’t tell you.
Only you know, in your head, whether your work is significant or not.
Whatever personal code you choose to live by, your success will follow.
I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him with the instinct of the healthy.
This shrinking was in course of time replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed.
In course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony.
I saw that he was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain.
I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself.
It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft,
himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.
Photo: Hermann Hesse
Content: Hermann Hesse, from the novel, Steppenwolf
When I’m honest in life, my mind is liberated from maintaining appearances and justifications.
What’s left is pure and true and fearless.
I become accountable to only one person:
Me.
I shook my head, about to disagree, but checked myself and asked, “What do you mean by nice?”
It had already taken me a considerable time finding the anarchy print that looked just right, and the belt chain! All those cheap ones were too shiny, I needed the dull color, indicating the realism of the street, of life.
When you begin to enjoy the anger and angst and fight, then you’ve left the true path.
The point of maturity for me was when I realized I didn’t need to fight anyone, I didn’t need to compare, I didn’t need to justify myself or defend myself. They could be them and I could be me, and that was ok, because in the end we were all the same.
The point of maturity for me was when I stopped thinking about what would this person do, or that person wear, or how I should fit in to some ideology, and instead, what should I do?
For myself.
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;
World losers and world forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.”
Quote reference: Arthur O’Shaughnessy
arabedrossian.org 