The way you travel

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

New and wholesome

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

Sunday Quote: Here

Happiness,
not in another place, but this place . . .
not for another hour, but this hour.

Walt Whitman

A new month

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

Fully

I don’t want to get to the end of my life
and find that I have lived just the length of it.
I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Diane Ackerman, 1948, American poet, essayist, and naturalist

Sunday Quote: Constant practice

Your brain is not designed to make you happy. 

That’s your job.

Tony Robbins