to catch a glimpse of the moon;
a fading trail of you."
"I've climbed onto rooftops,
to catch a glimpse of the moon; a fading trail of you."
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"To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel."
"Your feelings are always valid. Feelings are like reflexes; they are the body's natural response to a stimulus. A stimulus can be something external, like an event or action by another person, or internal like a thought or a memory. Emotions serve a purpose, which is why we evolved to have them. Emotions inform is of the personal significance of a situation, and their purpose is to organise and motivate and action. In other words, emotions exist: (1) to inform us that something significant happened, (2) to help us plan around actions to take, and (3) to hee us take those actions.
That said, emotions don't cause behaviour, actions, or choices, because people have free will. Emotions can cause physiological reactions, like difficulty in breathing, shaking, and crying but physiological reactions are NOT the same as behaviour. Behaviour refers to conduct, or actions that are chosen by the person. For example, fear can cause a panic attack, but anger cannot cause abuse. Trying to avoid, reject, or repress strong emotions paradoxically makes them stronger. Emotions cannot be controlled, but they can be regulated.” "You'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photography. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float.
Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. In between waves, there is life." "But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though no twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause."
"Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for sugar cookies. And fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or a subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention, hospital gurneys, and nose plugs, and uneaten Danish, and soft-spoken secrets and maybe, the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorise our days, are in face here for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives."
"The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as, e. g. ‘warm and cold’) where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites. An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions."
"For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another human being is detachment. Attachment, even that which imagines it is selfless, always lays some burden on the other person. How to learn to love in a light, airy way that there is no burden?"
"In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We're each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real.
We've got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there's an awful lot of grey to work with." "If a respectable good man sits with you, you would be watching every word you utter so that you do not say something wrong. Yet, you know that your words are watched by Allah but you still do not watch the words you utter."
God, forgive me. |
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