Tags: books
10/29/23
Her life standing up to Dan
Seeing that she was never a bad cat owner,
“The thing she had loved about swimming was the disappearing.. ..You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.”
“In this life she clearly had no taste. But since when did taste have anything to do with happiness?”
Nothing has to be wrong for you to be depressed. Depression can also come from a lack of stimulation, a lack of everything.
“She had thought in her suicidal hours that solitude was the problem, but that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. … The Lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid (“the tonic of wilderness”) solitude took on a different character. It became a connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
A Thing I Have Learned
(Written By a Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)
(Insert here)
“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”
“She wouldn’t poison herself with the pressures of imagined perfection. She would see her own hurt, recognize it, and not imagine there was a life of unquestionable positivity and happiness she was being deprived from. She would accept the darkness of life in a way she never had, not as failure but as part of a totality, as something that threw other things into relief, into growth, into being. The ash in the soil.”
“Her perspective was now open to uncertainty. And where there was uncertainty there was also possibility.”
———————End Of Reading——————-
Notes to expand on:
We may think about how each decision could make us better or worse.. perhaps we can’t escape that judgment of them, but decisions just make us. That’s all.
Decisions are investments into a different version of us.
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What a beautiful message in the end. Even if we had the options and could experience those best versions of our life. When we accept all of these different versions I think the best option is that one which we cultivated is the only life we could really live.
There’s some amount of disappointment that would follow us into choosing even the most satisfying versions of our lives.
The gratitude to build upon the land of which the volcano has erupted
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In every life of which she lived according to someone else’s dream, she had some of the most access yet still none of them fit. None of them were her.
Her dads dream, brothers dream, Dan’s dream, even in her own dream (though influenced a little)
Yet in her happiest life it was one in which she surrendered to the flow of life while continuing to pursue the things which brought her joy. (Though ultimately the only right choice was the one SHE invested in, it goes to show how we might arrive at the “most full of love” life)
Because when you never surrender to life or intuition, you get exactly what you set out for.. and none of the happy surprises beyond what we imagined.
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In life, you must choose your regrets.
In an existence where opportunity cost is baked in, because we don’t get the chance to split test things. By doing one thing you can’t do a different thing.
So decision frame.. what regret can I live with? This swaps the decision from “what do I want” to using your “running away from” engine