Gia⁷

“When someone tells you that population growth causes poverty, you’ll ask yourself how poverty may cause population growth.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The absence of a calm, wise, supportive and regulated adult caring for us, with a calm and mature nervous system to match, means that we can find it incredibly difficult to learn these all-important regulation skills, not just because of a lack of modelling, but because we tend to live in a survival state. A state where we push our own needs and feelings to the back of our minds and focus instead on just getting through the day. In this state, we do not learn to identify our needs, let alone meet them, and we do not learn how to resolve or regulate stress levels.”
― Sarah Ockwell-Smith, How to Be a Calm Parent: Lose the guilt, control your anger and tame the stress - for more peaceful and enjoyable parenting and calmer, happier children too

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library