grand

Remember to love yourself. You're worth it. 

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul. –Victor Hugo

Love and Loss...Epictetus

Two millennia ago, the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c. 55–135 AD) argued that the antidote to this gutting grief is found not in hedging ourselves against prospective loss through artificial self-protections but, when loss does come, in orienting ourselves to it and to what preceded it differently — in training ourselves not only to accept but to embrace the temporality of all things, even those we most cherish and most wish would stretch into eternity, so that when love does vanish, we are left with the irrevocable gladness that it had entered our lives at all and animated them for the time that it did. 

 When we are able to regard what we love in such a way, Epictetus argues, its inevitable loss would leave in us not paralyzing devastation but what Abraham Lincoln would later term “a sad sweet feeling in your heart.” To retain the memory of love’s sweetness without letting the pain of parting and loss embitter it is perhaps the greatest challenge for the bereaved heart, and its greatest achievement. 

 

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/epictetus-on-love-and-loss-the-stoic-strategy-for-surviving-heartbreak?utm_source=pocket-newtab 

Control

Imagine you are about to take your last dying breaths and you realize you argued over things you have absolutely no control over. That’s not living, that’s wasting....time.


“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....“ - Noam Chomsky

Thoughts from Whitman

Thoughts from Whitman...

Writing to a German friend on his own sixty-fourth birthday, ten years after his paralytic stroke, Whitman reflects on what the limitations of living in a disabled body have taught him about the meaning of a full life:

From to-day I enter upon my 64th year. The paralysis that first affected me nearly ten years ago, has since remain’d, with varying course — seems to have settled quietly down, and will probably continue. I easily tire, am very clumsy, cannot walk far; but my spirits are first-rate. I go around in public almost every day — now and then take long trips, by railroad or boat, hundreds of miles — live largely in the open air — am sunburnt and stout, (weigh 190) — keep up my activity and interest in life, people, progress, and the questions of the day. About two-thirds of the time I am quite comfortable. What mentality I ever had remains entirely unaffected; though physically I am a half-paralytic, and likely to be so, long as I live. But the principal object of my life seems to have been accomplish’d — I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives — and of enemies I really make no account.

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.

[…]

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

 

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/walt-whitman-on-what-makes-life-worth-living?utm_source=pocket-newtab 

Grief by Elizabeth Gilbert

Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.

There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You

Harlem by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

Silent Yell

Sometimes it comes down to really just taking a break from the normal stuff, the routine, the same old same old, the good habits, the bad habits and all things in between. Amazing what a day in the woods will do you for you. It won't solve all your problems. It won't even solve the problems that you wake up with that day, but it will give you hope. I am a firm believer that when you see growth in this world, growth of humans, growth of nature, growth of self, you see the possibility that you can grow....or start to grow against a different backdrop. Somewhere along this path, I stopped growing, got comfortable with life, got complacent, got used to being in the same place; mentally or physically. Got used to less than great people around me. Got used to people who give half the effort. Giving half the effort myself. Not giving at all. Giving to the wrong ones. Not holding the wrong ones accountable. Not holding myself accountable. We are human. We live, we learn, we falter, we grow. I think we can all agree on that. The ride I took Saturday showed me beauty. I got a chance to breathe that mountain air in. That air that I longed for from decades ago in Central Pennsylvania. Be it the morning chill or the night air, that cold air into the chambers and the shock of cold that let you know you're alive. I heard a line from a movie recently....about pain. A positive thing about pain. It's good to feel pain. It lets you know you're still alive. From the first mile to the last mile, I got a chance to take a break from an entire year, felt like an entire lifetime. I got a chance to exhale, not have to be something I am not, not entertain, not lead, not follow, just ride. Natural power in the natural environment. It was a while before I saw another human being. At one point I yelled in the middle of the woods. I knew nothing would happen. I knew that no human could hear me. I knew that the only things that could hear me were that which I could not see; hidden behind trees and bushes, hidden behind clouds, hidden under the water. It's an action that does not receive reciprocation aside from a dying echo. The thought in this day and age that you can yell at the top of your lungs and there is nothing that comes back, is both archaic and primordial. It made me laugh with immature giddiness that you can still do something like that....be alone and have no repercussions. This year has been a journey through loneliness; even among the big city, you get to be alone in your mind with your thoughts. You can be wherever you want to be. Sometimes it is just great to go to that space where you can have at it and get it out....yell at that pain...push it out of your heart and into the air where the echo of sadness eventually dies down.


"Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man." -Johann von Goethe