Nuggets of Wisdom
This is a WIP.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
~ Louise Erdrich
There is a great distinction between being #alone and #loneliness.
We can be lonely even when we are in a room full of people. If the room is full of people who lack virtues or at the least an appreciation for it.
We are lonely when we are #helpless, when we don’t have anyone to repose on when we are in trouble, in grief or suffering from a vice like anger or envy.
That is why we feel lonely when we loose a loved one, a #friend, wife, mother or son. We were used to relying on them in times of need.
One is not lonely when one is surrounded by virtue, even when one is completely alone. One’s own virtues or virtues of a wise friend. We are alone when we are inflicted with vices or are surrounded by misguided people.
Like a stoic practices poverty , we should also practice being alone. To get used to it, make it less #scary and #dangerous to us.
We should practice being our own best companion, adviser and protector. And devote what is left in us to advise and protect others.
“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
~ Hunter S. Thompson
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bf6bIZ1FkQfSPKL3Bo8euI897JswZFUmpgfNR00/
Passions stem from frustrated desire.
There was a universe in which you and I worked out.
It is not this universe, obviously. But there’s a universe in which we chose differently. There, I like to think we are clasping on to one another’s hands heading on an airplane to anywhere.
You’re kissing my forehead, falling asleep in my arms, while standing in line at customs and then the cab ride home.
I let myself be free in that moment, in that universe in the only distinct way only you seem to know how to be.
Because, the thing is your soul is barely human. You’re the first ray of sunshine bursting through the curtains in the morning. You’re the fresh fruit and free open breezes amongst the way open stretches of the sky. You’re endless. You’re inevitable. You’re the infinities.
And in some other life I chose to be all those things alongside you. I like to think the other-you and the other-me are happy.
I like to think, that through the messses, the destruction, the chaos and calamity and and troubles that the other-us would eventually face, they keep choosing out to stick anyway. They keep choosing each other anyway. They keep choosing the inevitable. The choice of happiness that keeps spilling out of us every morning we wake up next to each other.
And another version of myself is totally dejected, that none of this worked out. Some versions of the person we can spend lamenting over the people we could never be. And I can never choose- turning it over to her indecisive fingers, letting the weight of regret become an anvil.
But I’m not that version of myself in this universe. I don’t have to stay clutching onto the other-you and me. I’m happy to simply let them go.
I’m happy simply in knowing that, there’s a world out there in which you and I could have been tremendously happy.
It’s simple the realisation of those holes in reality that I know to exist and accept that keep me going on.
Wrong q : “Are there men out there who do not lie and cheat?”
Right q: “Why do I attract men who lie and cheat ?’
What if Salvador Dali and Moses smoked up together.
It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy… we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a deck of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.
~Tom Stoppard
And she is the reader
who browses the shelf
and looks for new worlds
but finds herself.
~ Laura Purdie Salas
Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass.
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”
I can only suggest that we often indulge in made work, in false business, to keep from being bored. Or worse still we conceive the idea of working for money. The money becomes the object, the target, the end-all and be-all. Thus work, being important only as a means to that end, degenerates into boredom. Can we wonder then that we hate it so?
Nothing could be further from true creativity.
Like Tolstoy, who some decades earlier admonished against writing for money and fame, and like Michael Lewis, who some decades later advised aspiring writers to find any motive but money, Bradbury argues that writing for either commercial rewards or critical acclaim is “a form of lying.”
This warping of motive can also deform our definitions of success and failure. Echoing Leonard Cohen’s wisdom on why you should never quit before you know what it is you’re quitting, Bradbury writes:
We should not look down on work nor look down on [our early works] as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.
