Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.
~Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
In real and tender ways, unrehearsed living means that we dare to let whatever sinks or floats or rises find its way to touch us, without pricking with explanation, without dousing its pain. It means that we dare to make a cup of what we don’t know and let the heart spill it. That, when spent and unsure, I can ask to be held and not regroup. Then, all this softness, all this yearning that makes the heart open like the throat of a baby bird, will deliver us into meaning.
~Mark Nepo, “Unrehearsed Living” from The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live An Authentic Life
Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~Mary Oliver
When the sweet ache of being alive,
lodged between who you are
and who you will be,
is awakened,
befriend this moment.
It will guide you.
Its sweetness is what holds you.
Its ache is what moves you on.
~Mark Nepo, Three Intentions blog, 9/17/12
you must trust.
you must be aware.
you must open your eyes.
you must ask for help.
you must trust.
you must accept that you are extraordinary—in the way that each person is extraordinary in his or her own way.
you are called to be Continue reading
I have learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life.
~Maya Angelou
Be patient with all that is unfinished in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, liked locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
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