Resolve

 It is ok to not be strong to get through something. It is a process. It is a flow. It is going through you. You can't really stop it. It will not go around you because it is in your heart and in your mind. You can block it out, but it will return. This is life. You can fill your head up with positivity, but you need to focus on that positivity. Know that even in the darkest times of life, there is something to be thankful for. We are all on this journey and while we may get off at different exits....we are all coming and going in this life. Take the time to be sad. Take the time to resolve the concerns in your head. Don't give up on yourself or those around you; they may need you more than you ever think they do. Don't let people's opinions or criticism get inside your head. What they think of you or your situation is not gospel. Stay on the path, well, stay on it as long as you can. It is ok to leave sometimes and wander. It is ok to go different places mentally or physically; stay there if it helps you feel better. Return when you can. Life will be waiting.

Do

 "Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do." -Oprah Winfrey

stars

 

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