David Cain > Quotes

“A conclusion is not the point at which you reach the truth, it’s only the point at which the exploring stops.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

“Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends — passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us — rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts — bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We’re perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we’re trained to lean towards something we don’t have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are.”
― David Cain, You Are Here

“But disasters are made of paper. You make a decision or two, then walk in to them like you would a harmless corner store, and soon they’re behind you, on the enormous pile of dead and harmless disasters that once had you worried sick.

The sky has fallen a thousand times already.”
― David Cain

“When you’re sitting there long enough that you finally see that unbroken line between here and your grave, that you really are that grave every bit as much as you are sitting here… you’ll never feel as free as that.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

“The standard way of reducing stress in our culture is to put as much energy as possible into trying to arrive at a moment that matches our preferences. This ensures that we feel some level of stress until we get there (assuming we ever will) and worse, it makes the present moment into an unacceptable place to be.”
― David Cain, You Are Here

“Essentially, meditation allows us to live in ways that are less automatic. This necessarily means less time spent worrying, ruminating, and trying to control things we can’t control. It means we become less vulnerable to the throes of the fear-driven, older parts of our brains, and freer to use our newer and more sophisticated mental abilities: patience, compassion, acceptance and reason.”
― David Cain, Making Things Clear

“Meditation isn’t only the act of successfully keeping your attention on the breath, it’s the whole period of time you spend with the intention to observe the breath. It is this intention and its application — not your success at achieving perfect concentration — that is responsible for the benefits of meditation.”
― David Cain, Making Things Clear

“The quality of your moment-to-moment experience determines the quality of your whole life, because ultimately they are the same thing.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

“By learning to allow different types of discomfort to simply stay in the room with you, without your scrambling for a button to push (real or metaphorical), you make discomfort matter less.
The pool of things you’re afraid of shrinks. It becomes a lot less important to control circumstances, because you know you can handle moments of uncertainty or awkwardness or disappointment without an escape plan.”
― David Cain

“When you can learn to go along for the ride, ordinary moments become compelling.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

“There are others. More than you can comprehend. They’re everywhere you go and you’ll meet some of them. Some of these other people will naturally establish themselves as a fixture in your life, and change how life looks to you. This is called a relationship. If the person stays around for months or years, your relationship with them might begin to feel permanent. It’s not. Relationships are conditions, not things. They all have to end at some point. But they will leave something behind for you to keep.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

“This is it. There are no rehearsals, and no reruns. Happy, sad, problems or no problems, ready or not… the camera’s rolling, and it’s on you. However you felt yesterday, recognize today that we are now officially on the air. We are live. You will never be this young again.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

“A lot of the time when we’re walking, we’re doing it just so we can be done with walking. There are times when that isn’t true though. If you can walk across a parking lot like you’re walking in a bathrobe from the shower to the kitchen on a Saturday morning, then you can make vast swaths of your time on this earth much better. This is no joke. If you get it, you get it.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again

“Because we’ve been given a powerful tool that we don’t know how to use yet. We’re millions of years of reptile brain wrapped in a thin layer of abstraction and intuition and reason.”
― David Cain, This Will Never Happen Again