Ameera JR > Recent Status Updates

“Selfishness is one of the surest sign of profound unhappiness”

“She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time.”

« ..after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer. »

« when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. »

"انا نادم على الساعات التي أمضيتها بعيداً عن الأحبة. على ضحكات ادخرتها لأوقات تخيلت أنها ستكون أكثر سعادة ولم تأتِ أبداً. على أحلام لم أتحلَّ بالشجاعة كي أحلمها. على أشخاص لم أتعرف عليهم لأني سجين نفسي القلقة والخائفة من المجهول."

Genetic evolution moves a lot less quickly than human history, making relics of much about our minds and bodies. It should be no wonder that we often eat too much, develop backache, tremble at the thought of sharks and get statistics entirely wrong. Narrowly speaking, it isn't our fault. It's just that a lot of who we are and what we want made a lot more sense in a world that no longer exists.

we can throw off the veil of illusion that works to separate us from the universe and start to identify with cosmic totality. It no longer matters exactly where we end and others begin; everything belongs to the same whole. There is a little less reason to grasp, to be puffed up, to be proud or to become embittered. We can survey the course of our lives and of our societies with calm indifference.

 »we should not be harsh or unjust toward  ourselves. We didn't personally make the world and we aren't individually responsible for its fate » .

« Our flawed brains are fateful generalizers from their earliest moments. They take the raw material of our young lives and extrapolate universal theories from it which can destroy our chances of responding adequately to the diverse and novel conditions of adult reality. »

« .. we may be following a life script simply because it feels familiar, not because it is rational or in any sense connected to our satisfaction, and thereby offer us a chance to invent newer and more satisfying ways to lead our lives. »

« ..We will have liberated ourselves from the madness of the age when we can look on loud and heroic lives-perhaps led by people we once knew-and with good faith say that this is not for us, that we are happier where we are, because we at last understand what we really require to survive mentally: a quiet life, cosiness, connection, and an ongoing lack of drama. »

« We should get better at detecting when illness might be drawing in, what the triggers for it might be. Then, when it is upon us, we should do and decide nothing. We shouldn't send emails or deliver judgment on our lives or plan for the future. We should, as much as possible, stop all mental activity and rest. »

« .. Our sadness
starts to seem like a personal curse rather than what it more fairly always is: an inevitable feature of being alive. »

“If we do not allow ourselves frequent occasions to bend, we will be at far greater risk of one day fatefully snapping.”

« .. Was I expected to find solace in these people? I felt alone, perfectly alone. So alone I felt divine. Divine like a lonely god unfathomable to anyone but herself. »

« No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail. »

« Of all their enemies - the cold, the ice, the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization. »

« ..And in the space of a few short hours, life had been reduced from a highly complex existence, with a thousand petty problems, to one of the barest simplicity in which only one real task remained-the achievement of the goal. »

« Et n'oubliez pas que la terre prend plaisir à sentir vos pieds nus et que les vents aspirent à jouer avec vos cheveux. »

Something happens when you dive into a world where clocks don’t tick and inboxes don’t ping. As your arms circle, swing and pull along the edge of a vast ocean, your mind wanders, and you open yourself to awe, to the experience of seeing something astonishing, unfathomable or greater than yourself. Studies have shown that awe can make us more patient and less irritable, more humble, more curious and creative

As American author Robert Fulghum wrote, ‘If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire — then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience.”

“The sense of being alive but suspended has long encapsulated for me a sense of the quiet sacred, of a kind of patient waiting, of a dark peace in the liminal stretch between the ocean surface and the depths. Where you are alone, but not afraid”

“While freediving, the deeper you go, the more you discard: ‘The trivia of everyday life falls away. And this is what it is for me, the sense that you are just one tiny speck amongst all these other living things on the planet … It’s the smallness of awe: floating under the surface you compress yourself, you are quiet, tiny in an immense body of water”

« Le travail est l'amour rendu visible. »

“If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?”

« I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? »

“A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world”

“..La mer m'appelle, qui appelle à soi toutes choses, et je dois embarquer… Et alors je viendrai à toi, goutte infinie ajoutée à l'océan infini.”

« Traveling is an invitation to explore alternative ways of living and thinking. There may be many more routes to being happy than the ones we’ve explored to date. Perhaps we can make the changes that had felt so impossible before. »

« Maybe fitting in is overrated. Maybe not looking like a fool is simply not an option in any rich and interesting life, wherever it may unfold. »