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“This is one reason we need to dispel the myth that empathy is “walking in someone else’s shoes.” Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.”
― Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
― Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
“How can you live now without building new regrets? What do you have to change in your life?”
― Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
― Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
“I once heard theologian Rob Bell define despair as “the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.” When we are in struggle and/or experiencing pain, despair—that belief that there is no end to what we’re experiencing—is a desperate and claustrophobic feeling. We can’t figure a way out of or through the struggle and the suffering.”
― Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
― Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
“Each of us has a taste of death when slipping into sleep every night or when losing consciousness under anesthesia. Death and sleep, Thanatos and Hypnos in the Greek vocabulary, were twins. The Czech existential novelist Milan Kundera suggests that we also have a foretaste of death through the act of forgetting: "What terrifies most about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. In fact, the act of forgetting is a form of death always present within life.”
― Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
― Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
“But despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is
always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind. Perhaps, as Plato says, we cannot lie to the deepest part of ourselves.
Had I been a citizen of ancient Athens circa 300 R.C.E. (a time often called the golden age of philosophy) and experienced a death panic or a nightmare, to whom would I have turned to clear my mind of the web of fear? It's likely I'd have trudged off to the agora, a section of ancient Athens where many of the important schools of philosophy were located. I'd have walked past the Academy founded by Plato, now directed by his nephew, Speucippus; and also the Lyceum, the school of Aristotle, once a student of Plato, but too philosophically divergent to be appointed his successor. I'd have passed the schools of the Stoics and the Cynics and ignored any itinerant philosophers searching for students. Finally, I'd have reached the Garden of Epicurus, and there I think I would have found help.”
― Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind. Perhaps, as Plato says, we cannot lie to the deepest part of ourselves.
Had I been a citizen of ancient Athens circa 300 R.C.E. (a time often called the golden age of philosophy) and experienced a death panic or a nightmare, to whom would I have turned to clear my mind of the web of fear? It's likely I'd have trudged off to the agora, a section of ancient Athens where many of the important schools of philosophy were located. I'd have walked past the Academy founded by Plato, now directed by his nephew, Speucippus; and also the Lyceum, the school of Aristotle, once a student of Plato, but too philosophically divergent to be appointed his successor. I'd have passed the schools of the Stoics and the Cynics and ignored any itinerant philosophers searching for students. Finally, I'd have reached the Garden of Epicurus, and there I think I would have found help.”
― Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
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