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
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.
Sometimes the most important recipient of kindness is the one most commonly overlooked: ourselves.
~ Sharon Salzberg
I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.
~ Hafiz
~ Image credit: Coleur on Pixabay
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?
~ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
~ Image credit: Kristaps Ungurs on Unsplash
So much of what we take in is bigger, better and more. But for some of us – small, simple and quiet are all we need. It’s okay to be happy with a calm life.
~ Erica Layne
A quiet mind is richer than a crown.
~ Robert Greene
Don’t make yourself small.
Not for anyone.
If someone tells you
you’re too much…
too loud, too sensitive,
too fierce, too caring,
too intellectual, too optimistic,
too realistic, too logical, too emotional…
just smile and move on, my friend.
Clearly, they aren’t enough for you.
~ L.R. Knost
Do not dim your light to make others comfortable.
~ Unknown
~ Image credit: Martina Bulkova on Pixabay
No matter how many scars we carry from what we have gone through and suffered in the past, our intrinsic wholeness is still here: what else contains the scars? None of us has to be a helpless victim of what was done to us or what was not done for us in the past, nor do we have to be helpless in the face of what we may be suffering now. We are also what was present before the scarring—our original wholeness, what was born whole. And we can reconnect with that intrinsic wholeness at any time, because its very nature is that it is always present. It is who we truly are.
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living
~ Image credit: NEOSiAM on Pexels
Curating Quietude 