Grace Cox > Recent Status Updates

“It is in gathering that we meet those who help us, and it is in gathering that we pretend not to need them, because we have it all figured out.”

“In a setting where activity provides a proxy for productivity, the introduction of tools email (and, later, Slack) that make it possible to visibly sig-your busyness with minimal effort inevitably led to more and e of the average knowledge worker's day being dedicated to ing about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through in-ant electronic messaging.”

“In the absence of more sophisticated measures of effectiveness,we also gravitate away from deeper efforts toward shallower, more concrete tasks that can be more easily checked off a to-do list.Long work sessions that don't immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—it's safer to chime in on email thread: and "jump on" calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy

"But it comes undone. There are so many times in life when we think we have it locked down," he says. We are quiet again.
Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights or tragedies pop up in their place. And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life that has been more painful than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined. "Right. That's the secret—don't skip to the end,"

“What I’ve learned is that when you clear the path to success-that’s when you consistently get there.”

“When you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them.”

“ the prescription for extraordinary results is knowing what matters to you and taking daily doses of actions and alignment with it.”

“In any discussion about success, the words "discipline" and "habit" ultimately intersect. Though separate in mean-ing, they powerfully connect to form the foundation for achievement-regularly working at something until it regularly works for you.”

“Toppling dominoes is pretty straightforward… in the real world, though, it’s a bit more complicated. The challenge is that life doesn’t line everything up for us and say, “Here’s where you should start.” Highly successful people know this. So every day they line up their priorities anew, find the lead domino, and whack away at it until it falls.

“… I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”

“I recognised winter.
I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I've learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important…”

“The subtext of these messages is clear: Misery is not an option. We must carry on looking jolly for the sake of the crowd. While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick. And if you can't pull that off, then youd better disappear from view for a while.
You're dragging down the vibe.”

“We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours. In song, we have permission to rehearse all our heartbreaks, all our lusts.”

“People used to complain that I talked at them instead of to them, so I discovered that I could inflect my sentences with moments of mock hesitation, adding in ums and ers to appear more uncertain than I actually felt. Now, standing in this room with the rain hammering on the window, I let my voice find its fluency again, absorbing myself in the pleasure of my own speech...”

“We are not consistently useful to the world at large… human societies are infinitely more complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair. Some of us make highly visible, elaborate contributions to the whole. Some of us are part of the ticking mechanics of the world, the incremental wealth of small gestures. All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us.

“Without a doubt, he had taken on their traits, but to be wolflike for him was to be quiet and watchful, intent, pared back. As he spoke, his gaze was always steady, frank. Next to him, I felt like an entirely frivolous being, all cultivation and artifice. I was a domestic pet, he a wild animal. A certain raw edge had been bred out of me.”

“As I have for most of my life, I felt that I was on the cusp of getting it all right and just needed a little more time.”

“Thinking of our walk with the Lord in the Christian life as expecting constant rebuke for sin and constant confession of sin makes me think of living with parents who constantly talk about what we're doing wrong rather than spending time with us in loving, joyful relationship.”

“But now I have been here a fair amount of time, and slowly I have learned that my true home is not just this place but is also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day. I live in their love, and I know something of the cost. Sometimes in the darkness of my own shadow I know that I could not see at all were it not for this old injury of love and grief…“

“Remembering, I suppose, the best days of my childhood, I used to think I wanted most of all to be happy- by which I meant to be here and to be undistracted. If I were here and undistracted, I thought, I would be at home…”

“MY FATHER COULD be gentle to the point of tenderness, but he was not invariably so. In certain moods, he had a way of landing on you like a hawk on a rabbit. He could be wondrously impatient; whatever needed doing he wanted already done by the time he thought of it, which would have been going some. Or he could be fiercely put out because you did not already know whatever he was trying to teach you.”

“I can see how near he came to turning loose all that he held together, and how, in holding it together, with my mother's help, he preserved the possibility of our life here; he quieted himself, lived, stayed on, bore what he had to bear. With my mother's help, he kept alive in his life our lives as they would be.”

“They were farming people. What distinguished them from ever-enlarging numbers of people in succeeding generations was that they had never thought of being anything else. This gave them a kind of integrity and a kind of concentration. They did their work with undivided minds, intent upon its demands and pleasures, reconciled to its hardships… never believing that they might have been doing something better.”

“When we're born, our brains and bodies are capable of just about anything. As we grow, our brains prune the neurons we don't need, just as our bodies reinforce the muscles we use most often. Our abilities narrow, our worlds narrow, our lives narrow, until we are a person whose life is not full of infinite potential but, instead, is teeming with memories of things done and left undone.“

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” - James Baldwin

“Each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape this aloneness.”
- Jim Harrison