“times in which you’re doing something that other people can quantify” and
“times you’re doing nothing.” It’s all important.
Your deepest revelations happen in silent moments with yourself. Being crowded with people and appointments and ideas and creative outpourings
wouldn’t be so profound and stunning if there weren’t also moments of aloneness and nothingness and mental drought. The context of things matters just as much as they do. The focal point of a piece of art wouldn’t exist without the negative space to frame it.
Unfortunately, nothing and nobody can hand you your happiness.
Fortunately, nothing and nobody can take it away. You’d want to write that one off as the oldest mind trick in the book, and yet. But still. We’re still seeking, even though we know better. We’re fighting our nature to grow and expand and enlighten and seek and create in place of the idea that it’s just meant to come to us. It’s as though we apply the ideas of “wanting” and
“trying” in completely wrong directions.
Time is not linear in the way we perceive it; everything is happening at once. You call into your experience that which you need and that which you are. You’re never with and you’re never without. You’ll never receive and you’ll never lose. You always were, you always are. That knowing is the foundation on which the real magic occurs.
Happy is boring. Beautiful is boring. People aren’t interested or attracted to just “happy” and “beautiful.” They’re interested in people who are interested in things. Who are different-looking. Who have stories, and ideas, and mindsets that mirror and complement their own. Nobody wants a person who gets mad if they convolutedly believe somebody insinuated that they’re “fat.” They want a person who says: “Fat is not a thing you are, it is a thing you have, and even if that weren’t the case…even if I were fat, who gives a fuck?” Love is more than pretending you look and behave and live a certain way.
The universe whispers until it screams. Your body whispers until it screams. “Bad” feelings are not meant to be staved off. They are not meant to be inconveniencing. They are you, or something greater than you, telling yourself: Something is not right.
Your gut voice will never go ignored. It will project out and eventually turn into big, loud external voices that demand you pay attention.
Learn to listen while it’s little.
The most hilariously ironic thing of life is that you have the most success doing what feels right. Following our genuine happiness, our internal peace, is our only real responsibility. The people who love what they do are always, always more successful than the people who “work hard” or claim
to. There’s an X factor you can’t mimic when you do something you’re genuinely passionate about. You tap into an otherwise untouchable energy.
Your identity does not have to be cohesive. Your story doesn’t have to flow. You don’t have to be neatly packaged in a way that other people understand.
You have to stop living for your synopsis, the summary we try to piece together in our minds when we imagine people explaining us or evaluating who we are. It doesn’t have to make sense. You’re allowed to be great at a lot of things that don’t necessarily relate to one another. You’re not limited to just one purpose, one talent, one love. You can have a variety of jobs, each of them meaningful at the time you have them. You can be good at a lot of things without lacking in others. You do not have to be a novel; you can be a book of stories. You don’t have to merge your coexisting truths and dull your shine just so it makes sense to a small-minded person who wants you to fit into a narrow understanding of what they’re comfortable with.
You do not have to only be what other people are comfortable with.
You often do not know what’s best for your life. Predicting your future does not make it more guaranteed to happen. It just closes you off. It gets you attached to an idea that you only want to be reality because you’re attached to it. The content of our attachments matters little in comparison to just wanting to be correct, to be in control, to feel as though we know what’s best and we’re succeeding by virtue of living out that which we just knew would happen.
Nobody in the history of the world looks back on their life and says, “Yes, this is exactly what I thought would happen.” But many, many people look around one day and say: “Yeah, I knew this is what I was meant for, but the details always surprised me.”
Things will work out better than you could have chosen or designed them.
In your unknowingness, however, it will seem as though everything’s been shot to shit. In the moments before you realize something better than you can fathom is coming to fruition, it will seem like every plan you made and hope you had has been completely disregarded by whatever higher power you do or don’t believe in. Have faith that you’ll get more than you think you deserve.
You have to become the kind of person who deserves the life you want.
Nobody ever got what they wanted by wanting it badly enough. Your life
will unfold in direct proportion to how much you believe you deserve. Not how much you think you should have. How much you believe you deserve.
61
THINGS WE
EXPECT OF OTHERS
(but rarely consider
changing ourselves)
01. We expect other people to be honest and open with their intentions (especially romantically), but how many people are we keeping on the back burner? How many people do we leave lingering and wondering and waiting just because it’s more convenient for us?
02. We get angry at people who aren’t unconditionally kind. We try to teach children to be kind by punishing them when they’re not. We demand that other people are open-minded and loving, often in very closed-minded and unloving ways.
03. We expect that if somebody is interested in us, they should have to make the first move. Nobody wants to be sitting around waiting for someone to ask them out or sweep them off their feet, but nobody wants to do the asking or sweeping, either. When’s the last time you leaped out of your comfort zone to tell somebody you care about them? When’s the last time you definitively asked somebody on a date—not just to hang out? When’s the last time you did what you want others to do for you?
04. We don’t understand when people aren’t compelled by the cause(s) we feel most strongly about, but we complain the second somebody else’s passions inconvenience us in the form of too many ALS
bucket challenge videos on our Facebook feed or “annoying”
political opinions that we don’t want to have to see or hear about each day.
05. We expect people to trust us right off the bat, but the reasons we don’t trust others are always justifiable.
06. When someone isn’t there for us unconditionally or doesn’t know that we need them without us having to say so, we find it rude and
selfish. But how often do we go out of our way to try to psychoanalyze and predict the actions and desires and intentions of the people in our lives?
07. We call people small-minded for making judgments about parts of our lives that they don’t know the whole of, but how often do we do that to strangers and coworkers and friends as a matter of daily conversation? We know that if people really knew us—really knew our whole story—they’d understand…and yet we run around judging others for things that we don’t understand, stories we don’t know the entirety of.
08. A common source of frustration is when people don’t take care of their relationship issues in a way that seems obvious to us—leave if the person isn’t perfect, “get over” the things you can’t change…but how often is that the case in our lives? We don’t allow others to be messy, but we expect them to lend a comforting shoulder when we’re in pieces.