Shawn

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
― Martin Buber

“As devasting as it is, cirrhosis is not the only end point I’m worried about here. I care about NAFLD and NASH — and you should too — because they represent the tip of the iceberg of a global epidemic of metabolic disorders, ranging from insulin resistance to type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is technically a distinct disease, defined very clearly by glucose metrics, but I view it as simply the last stop on a railway line passing through several other stations, including hyperinsulinemia, prediabetes, and NAFLD/NASH. If you find yourself anywhere on this train line, even in the early stages of NAFLD, you are likely also en route to one or more of the three Horsemen diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease). As we will see in the next few chapters, metabolic dysfunction vastly increases your risks for all of these.”
― Peter Attia MD

“One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. "To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“The fact that Evelyn Peabody had tried to kill herself sat with Artie for the entire evening and into the next day. He thought of writing her a card: I know what that feels like. But in truth, he could not find within himself what it was exactly that he had felt when he had wanted to do such a thing. Though it did come to him, as he and Evie got ready for bed that night, that after the Merrills' party (which seems years ago now, though it had been only a few months) he had said to Evie when they came home -- he had said something like "Why don't people every say anything real?"

And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand.

It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say