Taking Risks in Love
A girlfriend sent me this New York Times article by Arthur C. Brooks over the weekend. And I found myself shaking my head and thinking about my own attitude and how to live my life in a more hopeful, resilient, and mindful way.
(I'd post the article here, but there are probably some copyright laws against such a thing. So click over, won't you? And then let's discuss--I'll even open up comments on this for such a purpose).
“‘Go back?’ he thought. ‘No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!’ So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.”
this year's resolution
I set out to choose this year’s resolution very carefully.
Because last year I casually tossed out the idea, to live with less stuff. And then casual became a luxury. And resolution turned prophecy.
Don’t leave in the middle of the night, she said to me.
As though I could disappear myself and all of my things without making any noise. As though I might.
In the end it proved a clunking, inelegant Houdini-esque escape--all fumbled chains and unpicked locks and taxi rides uptown.
And a very, very much stuff left on a small stretch of curb between Bleecker and West Houston.
So in November, as the year’s end drew to a close, I set about choosing my resolution very carefully.
And choose I did.
To love. To love and all its many iterations. An action. A discovery. To love and all that that entails.
But I would stake my life on the fact that words choose us. Not the other way round.
And so in the end there was another set of words, not louder, but more persistent.
To stretch.
To stretch and all that that means.
Which is, quite a lot, as it turns out.
Which is literal and metaphorical. Which is me sitting at my desk, limbs all akimbo, trying to work the kinks out. Which is kindness offered more freely. Which is trying new things and working a bit harder. Which is letting go more easily and asserting my worth even when its terrifying. Which is sitting in the discomfort and breathing through it.
Which is me, up twenty minutes earlier than usual each morning, on top of a foam roller, hoping to loosen the inflexible mass that is my back. Which is really me, on top of a foam roller, opening up the area around my heart.
Which seems exactly the point.
words to live by // 02.08.15
It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that signs. | Wendell Berry
She had this laugh. I swear it’s why I married her, Laila, for that laugh. It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it. | Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
When I make him laugh, I feel like the most beautiful girl in the world. | Drew Barrymore
Someone once asked, “If you could take it all back, would you?” At the time I didn’t know. Now I do. I wouldn’t take that terrible experience back for anything in the world. Too much light has come out of my darkness. | Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence. | Antoine de Saint-Exupery
And we drink our coffee and pretend not to look at each other. | Charles Bukowski
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words. | C.S. Lewis