Nathan

“The word “decide” comes from a Latin root meaning “to cut away from.” Thus, decision-making, by its very nature, involves loss; we have to give up one or more options while at the same time grasping another.”
― Merle Bombardieri, The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life

“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Take any step toward our destiny through creative action (it may be as simple as lifting a pen over a blank sheet of paper), and we know intuitively that we are giving up whatever cover we had. Tiptoeing like the unwitting souls of classical myth who blundered into Pan on the mountainside, we have ventured into the sacred temenos of our own desiring and startled a god. The universe turns toward us, realizing we are here, alive and about to make our mark. We hear the wild divine elements in the world hold their breath, waiting for our next move, our next word, but at last the center of real attention, we turn quietly and take a step back, into the shadow of the trees, and, it is hoped, a quieter life.”
― David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

“One of the most memorably unexpected events I experienced in the course of doing this book came in a dissection room at the University of Nottingham in England when a professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere (about whom much more in due course) gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick from the arm of a cadaver. It was so thin as to be translucent. “That,” he said, “is where all your skin color is. That’s all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.” I mentioned this to Nina Jablonski when we met in her office in State College, Pennsylvania, soon afterward. She gave a nod of vigorous assent. “It is extraordinary how such a small facet of our composition is given so much importance,” she said. “People act as if skin color is a determinant of character when all it is is a reaction to sunlight. Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race—nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples. And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the color of their skin.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants