Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry.
Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
Ernest Hemingway
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
we have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.
Rumi
Close is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done…close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.
Our human essence lies not in arrival but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending unanticipated arrivals.
Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go.
David Whyte, “Close” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer…
John O Donohue, Eternal Echoes
Happiness,
not in another place, but this place . . .
not for another hour, but this hour.
Walt Whitman
Mysteriously, wonderfully,
I bid farewell to what goes, I greet what comes;
for what comes cannot be denied, and what goes cannot be detained.
Zhuang Zhou, 4th Century BCE
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