Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. ….. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
~ Image: Nathan Cowley on Pexels
Let go of the battle.
We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.
Hold yourself as a mother holds her beloved child.
Whenever I notice something about myself I don’t like, or whenever something goes wrong in my life, I silently repeat the following phrases:
The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
… the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. … As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” … My dark side says, “I am no good. … I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned.”
Curating Quietude 