Mark

“Feeling guilty because you “failed to think positively enough,” “didn’t have enough faith,” or didn’t reach some “ideal” is damaging to your psyche and your physical body.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Just keep moving and hope the next place will be better. It has to be. Just around the next bend, everything is beautiful. And it breaks my heart.”
― Lauren Hough, Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing

“Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.
And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow? Or... the 'intolerable.' It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything - lives with some profound personal sorrow... Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is - and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrow, I'm saying.
I'm saying: What if that is joy?”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“...in witnessing someone's being touched, we are also witnessing someone's being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another...can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays