J.M. Thompson > Quotes

“Compare and despair”: Nothing good can come from comparing your misery to someone worse off and judging your own as unworthy. Look to others in pain and understand that nobody is spared. Use that awareness to cultivate compassion and the energy you need to commit yourself to the liberation of all sentient beings. But if you break your leg, don’t look at the person in the bed next to you with two broken legs and dismiss your own leg pain as undeserving. Join the brotherhood of the broken ones. Join the sisterhood of survivors.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“What do you call the place where the sun feels really hot and the creek feels really cold and food tastes really good and your loved ones feel so precious you want to weep with joy? Reality.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“The rhythm of my body, held within the blanket of the tree canopy, matches the music of the sparrow and the babble of the creek as all the mourning and madness turns into sweat and sunlight, and Earth moves under me and around me and within me.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“Perhaps I have always been here, in this zone between the inner world and the outer one, where Earth in motion merges with mind and feeling and with all the times in memory and all the voids forgotten yet somehow sensed and known.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“Sometimes I think the point of all my running is to remember what it feels like to stop and rest.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“Run far enough and things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Total anarchy is loosed upon the mind.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“There is a path ahead of me. Nothing is ever altogether lost. There is a ground beneath us that never goes away.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“We run back to disaster to remind ourselves that we’re strong enough to bear it.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“It’s impossible to trust other people until you can trust yourself. Running made my own experience trustworthy.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“Everywhere I look, now has then folded up inside it.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“Ultrarunning can sound like insanity to people who don’t do it. But ultrarunners understand its mad logic: running for days and nights nonstop brings you right up to the edge of breakdown but also to the opportunity for breakthrough.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“There was joy before the fear. There was light in the time before the darkness came. There was light inside the darkness in the beginning and through all of time.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“If the School of Life gave classes on how a sad person was supposed to avoid turning into a suicidal drug addict, I had missed them.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“The drugs made my head hurt. But there was an easy remedy to feeling bad on drugs: more drugs.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“In the words of Hindu guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, “There are no others.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“We fall down, but we get up For a saint is just a sinner Who fell down And got up.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“Leaping up and down to techno at sunrise, high on drugs, it was a fake happiness. But fake happiness was surely so much better than real misery.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“Nothing in the law or the ethical codes of the mental health professions prohibits clinician self-disclosure. It is an unspoken, informal convention that nonetheless functions with a lawlike force, restraining candid speech. The conventional wisdom used to be that in order for therapy to work, therapists needed to function as “blank slates” upon which patients could project their longings, needs, and fantasies without the interference of knowing their therapists’ actual biographies. But the blank slate is a myth: therapists can’t avoid disclosing aspects of their identities automatically, for no other reason than their existence is embodied in directly observable features like ethnicity or age. Yet the de facto prohibition against therapist self-disclosure persists, in large part I believe because of stigma, and perhaps an overidentification by therapists in a “helper” role and corresponding anxieties around any concessions to their own experiences of human vulnerability. I believe it’s time as a society that we move forward to a more honest and open dialogue about the reality of mental health. Removing stigma won’t eliminate mental illness, but it will make it easier to talk about it without adding an extra dose of shame to an already painful experience.”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir

“The thing you do should be for you the most important thing in the world,” writes Jordan. “If you could do something better than you are doing now, everything considered, why are you not doing it?”
― J.M. Thompson, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir