Anaïs Nin: Where People Fail in Life
To find a comfortable “me” — a ritual, a routine, habit, a way of life or thinking — and decide that’s it, that’s who I am, is to deny the very meaning of being alive.
Novelist, essayist, and diarist Anaïs Nin observed a real danger of life: fixed-state living. Wishing things were the same. Hoping you hold on to your old self. And trying everything you can to not give up a specific version of yourself.
She thought identity evolves and that choosing to remain your “past” self was a recipe for a slow, quiet death.
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” — Nin
Most people fail at life because they actively force themselves into the same emotional and mental state.
They hibernate, cease to live, and call it existence.
“The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this)…
