swissmiss

“Of course I knew I was white, just like you do. I just didn’t consciously identify myself that way. Maybe it’s because it felt like it was unnecessary to acknowledge, or because it felt like the default, or because it felt embarrassing for reasons I could not yet articulate. But before that day, “white” was in the silent backdrop of how I defined myself, and then, the day I went viral, something shifted. I suddenly saw my own race as important, as having meaning, meaning that I had yet to fully understand.”

A Love Letter to All the Overwhelmed White People Who Are Trying, by Melissa DePino

“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.”

“Make Good Art”, by Neil Gaiman

“I have a theory—based on my experience interviewing thousands of people—that we humans are able to achieve wholeness and well-being in direct proportion to how we receive love. Not how the love is given, but how we are able to process and accept it.”

“I believe love when it comes in. It’s one of the most profound revelations I’ve ever heard. Love is all around, showing up in small offerings and dramatic encounters and everyday gestures. But we can’t receive it if we’re fixated on finding it in a package called “parent” or “husband” or “lover”—whatever label fits the story you’ve told yourself.”

How Oprah Taught Her Daughters From South Africa to Accept Love

“The point of it all is not to exhaust myself trying to build a body of work that eclipses my life, but to create a heart-centered body of work.”

— Holley M. Kholi-Murchison

What does time well spent mean to you? Resources to help you reflect.

“How we spend our time is how we spend our days. How we spend our days is how our life goes. How our life goes determines whether we thought it was worth living.”
— Keith Yamashita

Keith reflecting on his relationship to time. Wonderful.

“Much of what ruins the present is sheer anxiety. The present always contains an enormous number of possibilities, some hugely gruesome, which we are constantly aware of in the background. Anything could theoretically happen, an earthquake, an aneurysm, a rejection – which gives rise to the non-specific anxiety that trails most of us around all the time; the simple dread at the unknownness of what is to come.”

The Difficulty of Being in the Present

“According to numerous studies, emotion is a basic currency for remembering content. A listener must connect emotionally to what they hear in order to remember what the speaker says. Simply, we remember most vividly the events in our lives in which we were most emotionally impacted.”

Do You Need Charisma to Be a Great Public Speaker?, by Sarah Gershman

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Marriage is an aggregate of multiple narratives. It belongs to the people who are in it, but it also belongs to the people who are supporting it and living around it: family, friends, community. As I once said, and it became a kind of a saying for me, when you pick a partner, you pick a story, and then you find yourself in a play you never auditioned for. And that is when the narratives clash.”
— Esther Perel

Full article: Love is not a permanent state of enthusiasm

“People should think about the consequences of the little choices they make each day. What do you buy? Where did it come from? Where was it made? Did it harm the environment? Did it lead to cruelty to animals? Was it cheap because of child slave labor?”
— Jane Godall

More in this article.

“The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.”
— Bertrand Russell

“People’s ability to connect is the glue that holds our culture together. By thinning out our interactions and splintering our media landscape, the Internet has taken away the common ground we need to understand one another. Each of us is becoming more confident about our own world just as it drifts farther from the worlds of others. Empathy requires us to understand that even people who disagree with us have a lived experience as deep as our own. But in the fractured landscape of social media, we have little choice but to see the other side as obtuse, dishonest or both. Unless we reverse this trend and revive empathy, we have little chance of mending the tears in our social fabric.”

The Technology of Kindness, by Jamil Zaki

“It’s a rather simple question that quickly gets to the core of someone’s sense of well-being and legitimacy: did your childhood leave you feeling that you were – on balance – OK as you were? Or did you somewhere along the way derive an impression that you needed to be extraordinary in order to deserve a place on the earth?”

Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional