When everything feels too big, go little.
Wrap yourself with grace and space,
nibble your to-do’s, just one tiny bite at a time.
You can’t out outrun overwhelm, my friend,
but you can stay so still that it passes you by.
If you want to get more done, do less.
Stress dissipates in the face of guilt-free, intentional rest.
Image credit: Elisabetta Foco on Unsplash
May your heart be like a lake, with a calm, still surface, and great depths of kindness.
— Lao Tzu
Silence is a source of great strength.
— Lao Tzu
Image credit: pixelRaw on Pixabay
As the result of a brain injury, most of my days are confined to home. And yet, on this little country street, the world still comes to me — people of every age and shape passing by, some stopping for a small, friendly chat. These encounters, and the quiet rituals of home, give me something of what both Vonnegut and Didion name: the meaning found in the ordinary, the life that happens in fragments, the small dances we’re still able to make.
I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, you’re not a poor man why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ And so I pretended not to hear her and went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is we’re here on Earth to fart around. Of course, the computers will do us out of that. But what the computer people don’t realise, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel… These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them…I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life…
– Joan Didion
The cicadas sang louder and yet louder.
The sun did not rise, it overflowed.
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Summer feels as if it’s arriving. Two warm days in a row, cicadas in full voice — the season suddenly here.
Image Credit: Pixabay
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
Rilke’s words remind me of my impatience — my need for clarity, for certainty, for knowing how to live forward. But these things take time. Looking back now, I see that if I had allowed more to unfold in its own way, the road to here might have been gentler. Some of the answers might have come more quietly, and with fewer struggles.
Image credit: Boboshow on Pixabay
There are books that stay with us because they open something quiet and essential within us. Viktor Frankl writes of the one freedom no circumstance can take away: the freedom to choose our attitude, our way. He reminds us that when life cannot be changed, we are invited to change ourselves; and, that in extraordinary situations, our most human reactions are natural.
Man’s Search for Meaning is a book I return to often. Each reading is a reminder of what matters — presence, and the work of shaping our inner world. One of my all time favourite books.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.
Victor Frankl
My copy is a much older edition but I couldn’t find an image for it.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan – Researcher, Educator, Communicator, Advocate and Activist
We read to know we are not alone.
C.S. Lewis -Author
Image Credit: Vladimir Mokry on Unsplash
Curating Quietude 