December 2011
Some days are like this ...
Thought for the day
“I’m not going to die because I failed as someone else. I’m going to succeed as myself.”
Love of books
“…for some of us, books are as important as anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid pieces of paper unfolds world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet you or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of the things that you don’t get in life…wonderful, lyrical language, for instance. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
Some days are like this ...
“You are loved. If so, what else matters?”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (via misswallflower)
Thought for the day
“Remind thyself, in the darkest moments, that every failure is only a step toward success, every detection of what is false directs you toward what is true, every trial exhausts some tempting form of error, and every adversity will only hide, for a time, your path to peace and fulfillment. “
— Og Mandino
Dream large
“We must dream large, and we must also reality-test well. It is imperative that we do both. A person who dreams large but doesn’t effectively test reality ends up living in a fantasy world. A person who tests reality well but doesn’t nurture large dreams lives paralyzed in the ordinary world. A person who manages to do both occupies the only heaven heavenly enough to suit our creative soul, a heaven where creative projects are incubated and made manifest in the crucible of reality.”
- Eric Maisel Ph.D.
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
Some days are like this ...
Thought for the day
The purpose of fear is to determine how badly you want your dream.
- Robin Sharma
Open the door
“We write to expose the unexposed. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. You can’t do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can’t find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder.”
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
Some days are like this ...
“’But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,” said the Cat. ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’” —Lewis Carroll (via katelynrichelle)
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,” said the Cat. ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’” —Lewis Carroll (via katelynrichelle)
Thought for the day
“A life lived for tomorrow never comes, a life lived for yesterday never changes but a life lived for today is full of wonder, mystery and the choice to live happily ever after moment by moment.”
- Jackson KiddardGrowing up
“Growing up means learning what life is. When you’re little, you have a set of ideals, standards, criteria, plans, outlooks, and you think that you have to sit around and wait for them to happen to you and then life will work. But life isn’t like that, for anybody; you can’t fall in love with a standard, you have to fall in love with a person. You can’t live in a criteria, you have to live your life. You can’t wait for your plans to materialize, because they may never materialize the way you think they will. You can’t wait to watch your ideals and standards walk up to you, because you can’t know what’s yours until you have it. I always say, always take the first chance in case you never get a second one, but growing up takes that even one step further, growing up means that you have to hold on to what you have, when you have it, because what you have- that’s yours- and all the ideals and criteria you have set in your head, those aren’t yours, because those haven’t happened to you.”
― C. JoyBell C.
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
Some days are like this ...
Thought for the day
“Excitement must lead to immediate action or you will lose the power of momentum. More dreams die because we fail to seize the moment. Do it now!”
- Tony RobbinsAdvance confidently
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”
- Henry David Thoreau
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
Some days are like this ...
The four levels of social entrapment
The four levels of social entrapment - hilarious! I have experienced all of them. Have you?
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/09/four-levels-of-social-entrapment.html
“It puzzles me how many people still believe ‘friendship’ or at least bonhomie conducted in cyberspace isn’t a valuable form of social contact, but, say, being thrown together at an NCT group, or in halls of residence, or because your desks at work face on to each other, is. Or that anodyne small talk with a neighbour is ‘genuine social stimulation,’ whereas chatting over Twitter with someone 6,000 miles away who loves Top Gun and Jefferson Airplane as much as you do is just lonely, dysfunctional nerds clashing in cyberspace. This, to my mind, is idiotic. It’s time for us all to come out of the closet about our secret internet chums.”
—Grace Dent, How to Leave Twitter (via pitcherplant)
Thought for the day
“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
The feeling of not knowing
“I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.”
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
Some days are like this ...
Thought for the day
“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”
- James Allen
Leave time and space to grow
~ Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!
~Og Mandino
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
Some days are like this ...
Thought for the day
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
A sense of wonder
“This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of—please forgive me—wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious. Try walking around with a child who’s going, “Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!” And the child points and you look, and you see, and you start going, “Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!” I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world—present and in awe.”
Stress Management 101
Repeat as necessary.
