At any moment, whatever we are experiencing, only one of two things is ever happening: either we are being with what is, or else we are resisting what is.
Being with what is means letting ourselves have and feel our experience, just as it is right now. …
This is where genuine creativity, health, and communication, as well as spiritual power, arise from.
John Welwood
We waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of inner fortitude by asking others to map our way.
At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens.
The instructions are in the living,
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
The fool, with all his other faults, has this one also,
he is always getting ready to live.
Seneca
It’s time to get serious about joy and fulfillment, work on our books, songs, dances, gardens. But perfectionism is always lurking nearby, like the demonic prowling lion in the Old Testament, waiting to pounce.
Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart.
Don’t let this happen.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, Instructions on Writing and lIfe
Piglet noticed that even
though he had a very small heart,
it could hold a rather
large amount of gratitude.
A.A. Milne
Mindfulbalance 