Madye Stromboli’s Reviews > Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts > Status Update

'To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence, is to disown its' present value.'

One conclusion that follows that "this is it", is that striving towards sanity is never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead. ...Using sanity to refer very broadly to what if feels like to live the life you want to be living.

Treat your to do list as a menu: a list of tasks to pick from.

If anything, it's constantly berating yourself that's the self-indulgent path. Reflecting the inner taskmaster's hubristic belief that they can bully you into doing anything, merely by shouting loudly enough. Facing up to reality means facing up to the reality of your moods, desires, and interests too.

To inquire what your life task might be, is to switch your perspective in a manner that makes it possible to think new thoughts. It permits you to dig beneath the crust of assumptions that all to easily end up governing a life: that you have no option but to continue on your current career path, or that you mustn't make choices on which others might frown...

That's why indecision can feel so oddly comfortable. Its a form of postponement - a temporary avoidance of the painful sacrifices involved. Put differently: its a way of trying to dodge the inevitability of consequences. To make a decision, any decision, is to take ownership of the situation instead.

had to switch to an audiobook because someone put a hold on my copy of the book 3

My wife vividly recalls the moment in her teens, after a childhood steeped in moviegoing, when she realized that if something obliteratingly awful were to happen to her, or to someone she loved, it wouldn't be foreshadowed by sinister film music. No: it would just happen. Anything always could.