Cecile > Recent Status Updates

I've been slacking on my reading goal this year and I feel a lil bit guilty about it. I've been putting my energy into other things this year but I feel ready to focus on getting some reading done again!

[this is shaping up to be, perhaps, the most important book I've read in the past few years (maybe longer)]

note to self: when heartbroken do art

note to self: when heartbroken go workout

note to self: when heartbroken read more books

I'm reading this book as recommended reading in a mooc I started last week - "the science of everyday thinking" by the university of queenland. In it, we'll be exploring the psychology of why we think what we think, how we form and change our opinions, and how we can make better decisions.

"We know well that suffering helps us to understand, that it nurtures our compassion, and that for this reason it is vitally necessary for us. So we must know how to learn from suffering, we must know how to make use of it to gather the energy of compassion, of love, of understanding."

"If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. [...] Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our understanding, of our happiness. So do not say that you do not want to know anything about pain or about suffering, that you only want to know about happiness - that would be an impossible thing."

"The same is true of our mental formations, which include flowers like faith, hope, understanding, and love; but there is also waste material like fear and pain. The flower is on its way to becoming refuse, but the refuse is also on its way to becoming a flower. This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away."

This passage is important. Thich Nhat Hanh describes the way in which we can turn our suffering into joy, and how we can't have happiness without first having suffered, having know pain.

This book is so. fcking. incredible. Each story is powerful enough and the characters robust enough to stand on their own, yet the author somehow manages to intertwine their lives and connect them through space and time. (like wut how do you do this?) Which makes the overall story shine through in an absolutely brilliant way. I haven't even finished reading it and I want to read this again.