Love Dies...
by: Melanie T. Lim
Sometimes, love dies. And there is no easy
explanation for it.
Some of us see it coming. Some of us dont. But
most of us try not to see it at all. Because it
is easier to pretend that all is well rather than
admit that your dreams have been shattered and
that you are left only with the broken pieces of
your heart.
It hurts to imagine the person we love with
someone else. It hurts to no longer be the object
of his/her affections. It hurts to be no longer
the center of his/her universe. It hurts to no
longer be wanted. It hurts to be discarded,
replaced and dumped unceremoniously like an old
rag that has outlived its usefulness.
It hurts to no longer be loved.
But it happens everyday to the best among of us
to the beautiful, the kind, the talented, the
smart, the successful, the multi-awarded. It
happens to the perfect wife, sister, friend and
mother. It happens to the civic leader, the CEO,
the cover girl.
Whether or not its something we did or didnt do,
sometimes, love just dies. And overthinking would
serve no purpose.
To be loved is a blessing. But to no longer be
loved is not necessarily a tragedy.
Weve been raised since childhood to believe that
love must last forever. And perhaps it must. But
isnt it possible to simply be happy for the love
you have no matter if it doesnt last forever?
Isnt it possible to simple savor the moment and
become richer by it without wanting to possess it
forever? Isnt it possible to love and let go and
love again?
Isnt it possible to love forever but to love
different people over time?
Its all right to no longer be loved. Its all
right to stop loving. Its all right to mourn for
loves losses but to condemn yourself to a life of
misery because your love didnt last forever is
foolhardy. If love must die, let it go peacefully
into the night.
But dont keep score. Love is not a contest. It
is not a competition to see who emerges the
prettiest, the craftiest or toughest. Love is
what it is a gift. It cannot be forced on
anyone. Neither can it be forced out of anyone.
So let it be.
When love dies, hold on to the memories. But let
go of the one you love.
6.7.07
Love Dies...
SAPATOS
1. The overused shoes
When I went to
I found what I think was the best shoes I've ever
had. It was a blue and white slip-ons with a flower
on its strap. Margay ang tatak niya. Ang tagal ko na
naghanap ng blue na kikay slip-ons at doon ko lang
sa Gaisano Davao nahanap iyun. And I bought the
shoes for 500 lang! Feeling ko pa, suwerte ako dahil
last pair na iyun. And it was my size!
Sobrang natuwa ako sa kikay kong sapatos. At
napakalambot niya! I wore the shoes everyday because
they would match anything... denim, slacks, capri
pants, skirt, dress. Gamit ko siya in the office, at
the mall, in church, even at the beach!
Dahil araw-araw ko siyang nagamit, at nasuot ko na
siya sa kung saan, it was expected na wala pang
isang taon ay sira na siya. Sabi ko, okay lang. May
Margay naman sa Robinsons saka sa Landmark, siguro
naman may ganoong style pa sila. Ngunit napuntahan
ko na lahat ng display ng Margay pero wala akong
nakitang katulad nang nabili ko sa
Nakadalawang uwi na ako sa
Gaisano, umaasang may makikita akong ganoon klaseng
sapatos. Hindi na nga ako naghahangad ng eksaktong
ganoon eh. Kahit na kamukha lang o kasing-lambot
lang, okay na. Kaso wala.
Iyong kikay blue Margay na slip-ons ko -- na
malambot at may naka-angat na bulaklak sa strap, na
bagay sa kahit anong damit ko -- ay sira na ngayon.
Hindi lang siya sira, nangingitim na sa dumi, at
hindi na kayang i-glue ang punit na talampakan. Pero
hindi ko pa siya maitapon-tapon. Hindi ko alam kung
bakit. Alam ko hindi ko na siya maisusuot uli, pero
may reminder naman ako na once upon a time, I had a
perfect pair of shoes. Hindi ko nga lang inalagaan.
Lesson learned:
Kapag nahanap mo na ang bagay o tao na sa tingin mo
ay perfect na para sa iyo, ingatan at alagaan mo.
Huwag mong abusuhin. Kapag nawala sila, baka wala ka
nang mahahanap na kapalit. At habambuhay mo na lang
iisipin na "
2. The "maganda siya pero masakit" shoes
May fini-fit ako
lang ang presyo. Maganda ang material. Kikay ang
hitsura. At kapag suot ko, nakaka-sexy ng paa. May
isang problema nga lang... masakit sa paa.
Pero cutie kasi siya eh. Saka on sale. At sadyang
matigas ang ulo ko. Kaya ayun, binili ko.
Sa umpisa, okay lang naman. Keri ko. Saka masakit
naman talaga sa paa ang bagong sapatos. Pero habang
lumilipas ang oras, lalong sumasakit. Hindi siya
meant sa pangmatagalang suot. Habang suot ko siya,
parang gusto kong umiyak sa tuwing humahakbang ako.
Pagdating ko ng bahay, puro sugat at galos ang paa
ko. At ilang linggo din akong may peklat sa paa
dahil sa diyaskeng sapatos na iyun.
Kapag sa umpisa pa lang, alam mo na masakit na sa
paa at hindi mo puwedeng suotin ng matagalan, huwag
mo nang bilhin. Bakit mo pa itutuloy kung alam mong
masasaktan ka lamang kapag sinuot mo?
Parang pakikipag-relasyon din iyan eh. May mga
lalake na good on paper, bagay sa iyo, tipo mo nga
eh. Ang kaso, panandalian lang siya. "Boylet" lang
kasi unavailable siya. Bakit mo pa itutuloy kong
alam mong eventually ay masasaktan ka lang?
habang maaga pa, iwasan mo na.
Lesson learned:
Kung sa umpisa pa lang, alam mo na masasaktan ka
lamang sa bandang huli, huwag mo nang ituloy. Baka
mag-iwan pa iyan ng scar na hindi mo na maaaalis
kailan man.
3. The shoes that got away
May nakita akong magandang sandals sa Landmark. Mura
lang, less than 500 lang siguro. Kakaiba din siya
kasi hindi siya iyong style na makikita mo sa
babaeng katabi mo sa MRT. Black and white siya.
Polka dots ang strap niya pero hindi cheap ang
dating. Ang kikay nga eh. tapos, two inches iyong
heels niya. Sinukat ko minsan, ang ganda sa paa!
Kaya lang, hindi ko siya binili. Kasi, kakaiba siya
eh. Mahirap hanapan ng ka-match na damit at bag.
Saka kakabili ko lang kasi ng isang sandals kaya
sabi ko, next pay day ko na lang bibilhin ang polka
dots na sapatos na yun.
Madalas akong dumaan sa Landmark at nakikita ko ang
sapatos na gusto ko bilhin pero hindi ko
mabili-bili. Ilang pay day na ang dumaan pero hindi
ko pa rin siya kinukuha para iuwi. Hanggang sa
dumating ang oras na kailangan ko ng isang kikay na
sandals na may print. Naisip ko agad ang polka-dots
na matagal ko na gusto bilihin. Pero pag-punta ko sa
Landmark, wala na siya doon. Naubos na. Ang ending,
napabili ako ng ibang printed na sapatos na hindi ko
naman talaga gusto pero wala akong choice kasi
kailangan ko na nga.
Lesson learned:
Kung magpapaligaya sa atin ang isang bagay, seize
the day! Sa kaka-delay, baka mawala lang sa atin ito
at mauuwi tayong nagse-settle sa hindi naman talaga
natin gusto. Mas mahirap pagsisihan ang mga bagay na
hindi mo ginawa. Wala na yatang mas masakit pa sa
thought na abot-kamay mo na lang, pero pinalampas mo
pa.
Sino ba naman mag-aakalang may mapupulot pala akong
leksyon sa mga sapatos? Kaya nga panay bili ko eh,
para mas marami pa akong matutunan. Sa susunod, I
will find lessons from bags naman para ma-justify
din kung bakit sandamakmak ang bags ko.
- anonymous -
Lessons I Have Learned about LOVE
- from the book The Choice is Yours by John Maxwell -
Love People Now: You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow – or if you will see tomorrow at all. Love people now. It’s said that the bishop of Uganda, during an especially tumultuous time in his country, said, “If you're going to love someone, do it quickly!” That’s the advice each of us needs to take to heart.
Love is Vulnerable: If you love others, then you will be hurt. Because when you open your arms to another, you make yourself an easy target. Do it anyway. Only the pain of never having loved is worse than the pain of having your heart broken.
Love is Powerful: Love has the power to change the world. It was love that prompted God to create the world. It was love that caused Him to send Jesus to save it. When you love others, anything is possible.
Love Only Lasts with Hard Work: No friendship lasts for decades without hard work. No marriage survives half a century without both partners fighting to make it work. No relationship thrives without sweat and tears and toil. If you want a relationship to last, you will have to give up other things for it.
Love is Unconditional: If there are strings attached, then it isn’t really love. A person needs to be loved the most when they deserve to be loved the least. When you love people, you keep on loving them. You make their problem, your problem. You stick with them to the end.
Clean Out the Closets of your Life
Clean Out the Closets of your Life
by Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE
Clean out the closets of your life. Have you ever looked at the clothes in your closet with a critical eye: the bargain shoes in the wrong color; the expensive suit you got on sale that never fit; the "great" shirt that was a gift from someone you love?
I had all of those items in my closet. Then a wardrobe consultant friend came over and made me clean out the clothes that didn't fit or that no longer represented my self-image. It was an exhilarating feeling. Now the clothes I wear make me feel and look great, and project the image I like.
Your clothes closet isn't the only hiding place for negative things in your life. You have a self-image closet too. Take a serious look at what you find there. Try cleaning it out. Throw out ideas that no longer fit your lifestyle or your experiences.
Clean your closet of certain old friends as well -- the ones who have become acquaintances. Too often we spend our energies with people whose interests have grown apart from ours.
Clean the negative people out of your life's closet. Some folks cannot accept your achievements, insisting it's only a "fluke" when you finally attain a great goal. Their own insecurities require them to shoot other people down. It is time to let them know you are proud of your achievements, and then move on to someone who will support you in your endeavors.
Closets may be hiding places for our outmoded clothes and ideas, but they are also where we store the building blocks for our daily lives. Don't let them get cluttered with outdated ideas.
by Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE
Clean out the closets of your life. Have you ever looked at the clothes in your closet with a critical eye: the bargain shoes in the wrong color; the expensive suit you got on sale that never fit; the "great" shirt that was a gift from someone you love?
I had all of those items in my closet. Then a wardrobe consultant friend came over and made me clean out the clothes that didn't fit or that no longer represented my self-image. It was an exhilarating feeling. Now the clothes I wear make me feel and look great, and project the image I like.
Your clothes closet isn't the only hiding place for negative things in your life. You have a self-image closet too. Take a serious look at what you find there. Try cleaning it out. Throw out ideas that no longer fit your lifestyle or your experiences.
Clean your closet of certain old friends as well -- the ones who have become acquaintances. Too often we spend our energies with people whose interests have grown apart from ours.
Clean the negative people out of your life's closet. Some folks cannot accept your achievements, insisting it's only a "fluke" when you finally attain a great goal. Their own insecurities require them to shoot other people down. It is time to let them know you are proud of your achievements, and then move on to someone who will support you in your endeavors.
Closets may be hiding places for our outmoded clothes and ideas, but they are also where we store the building blocks for our daily lives. Don't let them get cluttered with outdated ideas.
Crowded Words : Zooming in the Epidermis of Time
Contributed by styar (Edited by mananalaysay)
Saturday, November 22, 2003 @ 12:00:02 AM
How do you get away from a boring life?
Everyday you wake up in the morning you grab a mug and pour out a coffee from the pot. Get dressed, and walk towards a bound direction. Time and place are like a one-way street that you pass by every now and then not by choice but by certain obligation. You sit on a chair and stare at the clock until your eyes sore. Then, when everyone seems ready with their backpacks, you’ll pour out the last coffee of the day and head towards that same road again. You talk in your sleep and wish life could be a little different just for once. Then you wake up at exactly the same position as the first time you sleep.
Life is a big redundancy of what you make it.
It happens without you being fully aware of the time and days that passed by. It’s as if months have already passed when in reality, it has only been days. You live, merely for living…merely for breathing.
Life could mean two things for people: a vibrator or a time bomb. Both concepts center on time as a major element but function on the opposite side of the leverage. The first one sees life as a constant prodder—both acting as a regulator and energy booster. There’s no room for limp soul only those who wish to contend and be contended with. Meanwhile, for those who see life as a time bomb, everything swirls up and readily be blown away when you least expected it.
Boredom. World weariness. Monotony. Whichever way we want to describe it, only one thing remains…we all go through it at one point in time. It’s like a sudden gush of wind, we don’t see it coming but we feel it. We can’t prepare ourselves for it, but we have no choice but to face it. And when it’s there, it confronts us with fierce.
Everyone is a bore to someone. But that’s beside the point. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
###############
An average person gets bored at least 6 times a day; 42 times a week; 186 times in a month; and 2,190 times in a year. People who surpass that figures are those who put boredom in their own hands and do something about it. Meanwhile, those who stay on the line, either like to wallow or they simply love the whole idea of boring oneself.
Contributed by styar (Edited by mananalaysay)
Saturday, November 22, 2003 @ 12:00:02 AM
How do you get away from a boring life?
Everyday you wake up in the morning you grab a mug and pour out a coffee from the pot. Get dressed, and walk towards a bound direction. Time and place are like a one-way street that you pass by every now and then not by choice but by certain obligation. You sit on a chair and stare at the clock until your eyes sore. Then, when everyone seems ready with their backpacks, you’ll pour out the last coffee of the day and head towards that same road again. You talk in your sleep and wish life could be a little different just for once. Then you wake up at exactly the same position as the first time you sleep.
Life is a big redundancy of what you make it.
It happens without you being fully aware of the time and days that passed by. It’s as if months have already passed when in reality, it has only been days. You live, merely for living…merely for breathing.
Life could mean two things for people: a vibrator or a time bomb. Both concepts center on time as a major element but function on the opposite side of the leverage. The first one sees life as a constant prodder—both acting as a regulator and energy booster. There’s no room for limp soul only those who wish to contend and be contended with. Meanwhile, for those who see life as a time bomb, everything swirls up and readily be blown away when you least expected it.
Boredom. World weariness. Monotony. Whichever way we want to describe it, only one thing remains…we all go through it at one point in time. It’s like a sudden gush of wind, we don’t see it coming but we feel it. We can’t prepare ourselves for it, but we have no choice but to face it. And when it’s there, it confronts us with fierce.
Everyone is a bore to someone. But that’s beside the point. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
###############
An average person gets bored at least 6 times a day; 42 times a week; 186 times in a month; and 2,190 times in a year. People who surpass that figures are those who put boredom in their own hands and do something about it. Meanwhile, those who stay on the line, either like to wallow or they simply love the whole idea of boring oneself.
What You'll Wish You'd Known
by Paul Graham
January 2005
(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)
When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1]
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]
We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?
Upwind
I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.
To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.
Ambition
In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.
Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]
Some people say this is inevitable-- that high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day.
The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.
I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]
You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
Corruption
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.
In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing.
Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
Curiosity
And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.
When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?
Now
If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail.
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn.
Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8]
Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.
Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]
This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.
Notes
[1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?"
[2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. So far the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor.
[3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity.
Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless.
However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these days.
[4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them.
I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people.
I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.
[5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them?
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)
[7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.
[8] And then of course there is money. It's not a big factor in high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants. But a lot of great things were created mainly to make money. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." (Many hope he was exaggerating.)
[9] Even college textbooks are bad. When you get to college, you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who need the money. It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse in the production of high school textbooks.
[10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.
January 2005
(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)
When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1]
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]
We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?
Upwind
I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.
To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.
Ambition
In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.
Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]
Some people say this is inevitable-- that high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day.
The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.
I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]
You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
Corruption
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.
In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing.
Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
Curiosity
And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.
When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?
Now
If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail.
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn.
Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8]
Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.
Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]
This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.
Notes
[1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?"
[2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. So far the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor.
[3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity.
Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless.
However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these days.
[4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them.
I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people.
I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.
[5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them?
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)
[7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.
[8] And then of course there is money. It's not a big factor in high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants. But a lot of great things were created mainly to make money. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." (Many hope he was exaggerating.)
[9] Even college textbooks are bad. When you get to college, you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who need the money. It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse in the production of high school textbooks.
[10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.
Wear sunscreen.
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the
people who knew you when you were young.
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.
Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.
Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders.
Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
-- Mary Schmich
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the
people who knew you when you were young.
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.
Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.
Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders.
Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
-- Mary Schmich
Love is like the wind. You can’t see wind, but you know if it is there. You can't control it, but you can harness its energy. You know wind is there because you feel it. What happens around you tell you that the wind is there. Wind is difficult to understand. It varies in strength and intensity. At times, it disappears, and you wonder if it will ever come back. Wind can be dangerous when it is out of control, becoming destructive, hurting and harming anything it runs into.
Love, like the wind, is a force in life. You can’t see it directly. Yet, you feel it in your relationships with others. You see its results, in kindness, or acts of affection, but you can’t see love, itself. You can’t force love. If you use force to try to get love, you are bound to lose it. To love out of coercion, threats, or fear, is not love, but compliance. Threats may be subtle, not in words, but with behavior or gestures.
You can harness love’s energy when, and if, it occurs. You do this by loving back in an accepting, non-controlling way. Nobody owns anyone else through love. Love is a freeing not an entrapping emotion. Love involves accepting someone for what and who they are, not what you want them to be.
To love is to make a choice, an emotional commitment to someone else. This is great in one way, but dangerous in another way. The more you invest in something, the more upset you are if your investment is lost, and the more you convince yourself you have the right to it, regardless of what others think. Love can become possessive, changing into jealousy and suspicion. A jealous person is obsessed with another person, but seldom takes a good look at himself, and doesn’t recognize that his destructive feelings are created by his own fears and inadequacies.
To love is to make a choice, an emotional commitment to someone else. This is great in one way, but dangerous in another way. The more you invest in something, the more upset you are if your investment is lost, and the more you convince yourself you have the right to it, regardless of what others think. Love can become possessive, changing into jealousy and suspicion. A jealous person is obsessed with another person, but seldom takes a good look at himself, and doesn’t recognize that his destructive feelings are created by his own fears and inadequacies.
You harness love’s energy when you treat it right, when you give love the freedom to be, to exist in its unique and special way, not in the way that you believe it should or must be. You don’t control with love. You allow the other person to be himself.
You can’t create love. You can’t force it. Yet, you usually know when it is around. Love varies in intensity. Sometimes it is exciting. Other times it is calm and gentle. Recognize love in its many splendor forms. Avoid analyzing or chasing after it. Let it be, and enjoy it. Love may express itself in anger. A person may feel hurt and concerned, and their love and concern may come out as anger or rage. Love also has quiet times.
Valentines Day helps to focus on love and its importance in life. Love thrives when it is celebrated between people on a regular basis. You celebrate love when you give a loved one a hug, or say, "I like you", or go out of your way to do some little thing they appreciate, without their asking. Lovers develop their own personal ways of celebrating love and caring. Being the first to get up, leave your warm bed, and walking on a cold kitchen floor, to make a cup of coffee for your partner to have in bed, is an act of loving. Have you tried it recently? If not, think about it. After all, you can celebrate Valentines Day more than once a year if you want to, and in many, many ways.
-- PJ O'Rourke (1993)
What Others Think
What Others Think
When you seek to truly make a difference, someone is going to tell you no. But that's their problem, not yours. No matter how magnificently you perform, someone is going to find a way to complain about it. But that's their problem, not yours.
It can be extremely valuable to understand what other people think, and quite useful to make a positive impression whenever possible. Always keep in mind, though, that the opinions of others are just that -- opinions.
Let their opinions, whatever they may be, support and encourage you rather than stop you. Keep in mind that attempts to please everyone will all too often end up pleasing no one.
Some people are just not going to like you, no matter what you do. Some people are going to disagree with you, no matter how reasonable you are. Just because someone rejects what you're doing does not mean you must reject it too. Listen to the rejections, listen to the complaints, learn from them, take whatever positive actions are appropriate, and then move confidently forward.
-- Ralph Marston
Falling In Love
It is a mystery why we fall in love.
It is a mystery how it happens.
It is a mystery when it comes.
It is a mystery why some love grows and it is a mystery why some love fails.
You can analyze this mystery and look for reasons and causes, but you will never do anymore than take the life out of the experience.
Just as life itself is more than the sum of the bones and muscles and electrical impulses in the body, love is more than the sum of the interests and attractions and commonalities that two people share.
And just as life is a gift that comes and goes in its own time, so too, the coming of love must be taken as an unfathomable gift that cannot be questioned in its ways.
Sometimes, hopefully at least once in your life - the gift of love will come to you in full flower, and you will take hold of it and celebrate it in all inexpressible beauty. This is the dream we all share.
More often, it will come and take hold of you, celebrate you for a brief moment, then move on.
When this happens to young people, they too often try to grasp the love and hold it to them, refusing to see that it is gift that is freely given and a gift that just as freely, moves away.
When they fall out of love, or the person they love feels the spirit of love leaving, they try desperately to reclaim the love that is lost rather than accepting the gift for what it was, then moving on.
They want answers where there are no answers. They want to know what is wrong in them that makes the other person no longer love them, or they try to get their lover to change, thinking that if some small things were different, love would bloom again.
They blame their circumstances and say that if they go far away and start a new life together, their love will grow.
They try anything to give meaning to what happened. But there is no meaning beyond the love itself, and until they accept its own mysterious ways, they live in a sea of misery.
You need to know this about love, and to accept it.
You need to treat what it brings you with kindness.
You need to treat what it brings you with kindness.
If you find yourself in love with someone who does not love you, be gentle with yourself. There is nothing wrong with you. Love just didn't choose to rest in the other person's heart.
If you find someone else in love with you and you don't love her, feel honored that love came and called at your door, but gently refuse the gift you cannot return. Do not take advantage, do not cause pain. How you deal with love is how you deal with you, and all our hearts feel the same pains and joys, even if our lives and ways are different.
If you fall in love with another, and she falls in love with you, and then love chooses to leave, do not try to reclaim it or to assess blame. Let it go. There is a reason and there is a meaning. You will know in time.
Remember that you don't choose love. Love chooses you. All you can really do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing, then reach out and give it away.
Give it back to the person who brought it alive in you. Give it to others who deem it poor in spirit. Give it to the world around you in anyway you can. This is where many lovers go wrong. Having been so long without love, they understand love only as a need. They see their hearts as empty places that will be filled by love, and they begin to look at love as something that flows to them rather than from them.
The first blush of new love is filled to overflowing, but as their love cools, they revert to seeing their love as a need. They cease to be someone who generates love and instead becomes someone who seeks love. They forget that the secret of love is that it is a gift, and that it can be made to grow only by giving it away..
Remember this, and keep it to your heart. Love has its own time, its own seasons, and its own reasons for coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it, or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you. But if it choose to leave from your heart or from the heart of your lover, there is nothing you can do and there is nothing you should do.
Love always has been and always will be a mystery.
Be glad that it came to live for a moment in your life.
Be glad that it came to live for a moment in your life.
If you keep your heart open, it will come again.
Kent Nerburn
from the book "Letters To My Son"
Do you believe in destiny?
by askbianca
They say that ‘destiny’ is rather an ethereal belief that lies amongst many people….many lovers… Yet, it is usually defined as ‘an evitable event in the future that takes place’ …That no matter how much you want to stop it…it will eventually happen….
What many have tried to avoid so much still happened because of this such thing… What many have fought against, still happened for they have been written in the stars… What hearts desired the most and had to let go still met in the end after they let their fate go on its own…. They let go…yet, they became destined?
So is it all about letting go? Then how about those long suffered hearts that fought very much to hold onto their love, and still…after all the pain…they made it. But how about those who held on tightly yet they had to let go? Not because they decided fate to have the chance to make them meet once more…but because no matter how much they try to hold on…fate was already the one who decided to give up on them?
Destiny…. One word… with many definitions… thousands of love hopes and relies on it… quite some who already cursed its ways… from believers to the non-believers… from the hopefuls to the ones who already lost…
Yet, afar from all these…when the word ‘destiny’ is heard… only one other word comes clear to everyone’s mind… love….
They say when you finally find true love…never let it go… Because when you find it…then you finally found your destiny… it can only be encountered once in your life....
Never give up… That’s what they have all said… Never give up… you wouldn’t know…maybe what you’re giving up is the one destined for you… Then you have given up your own destiny… but what if your destiny was…to give up? Will you still hold on knowing it was just not meant to be?
Destiny…would you hold onto it? Or you would let go? To believe in destiny…that you decided to hold on or to let go?
Which path in life you would go? Which risk shall you take?
For the one you love…for the one you believe solemnly is your destiny… would you still hold on tightly on that love when not the world separates you but fate? Or will you force yourself to learn to just finally let it all go…. Would that be the right thing….or would it be another mistake…
Do you believe in destiny?
Does it mean holding on? Or letting go? That you will hold on very tight in that love that as you do…you are letting go of it…Not only because the world is against you…Not because it isn’t right… but because… you are finally placing your hopes, your dreams and your love onto fate’s very hands…
Not because you are tired of fighting nor tired of loving…but because you simply believed in destiny…
….that no matter what place, what generation, what time and what lifetime…
When it is meant to be…..
……then it shall be….
by askbianca
They say that ‘destiny’ is rather an ethereal belief that lies amongst many people….many lovers… Yet, it is usually defined as ‘an evitable event in the future that takes place’ …That no matter how much you want to stop it…it will eventually happen….
What many have tried to avoid so much still happened because of this such thing… What many have fought against, still happened for they have been written in the stars… What hearts desired the most and had to let go still met in the end after they let their fate go on its own…. They let go…yet, they became destined?
So is it all about letting go? Then how about those long suffered hearts that fought very much to hold onto their love, and still…after all the pain…they made it. But how about those who held on tightly yet they had to let go? Not because they decided fate to have the chance to make them meet once more…but because no matter how much they try to hold on…fate was already the one who decided to give up on them?
Destiny…. One word… with many definitions… thousands of love hopes and relies on it… quite some who already cursed its ways… from believers to the non-believers… from the hopefuls to the ones who already lost…
Yet, afar from all these…when the word ‘destiny’ is heard… only one other word comes clear to everyone’s mind… love….
They say when you finally find true love…never let it go… Because when you find it…then you finally found your destiny… it can only be encountered once in your life....
Never give up… That’s what they have all said… Never give up… you wouldn’t know…maybe what you’re giving up is the one destined for you… Then you have given up your own destiny… but what if your destiny was…to give up? Will you still hold on knowing it was just not meant to be?
Destiny…would you hold onto it? Or you would let go? To believe in destiny…that you decided to hold on or to let go?
Which path in life you would go? Which risk shall you take?
For the one you love…for the one you believe solemnly is your destiny… would you still hold on tightly on that love when not the world separates you but fate? Or will you force yourself to learn to just finally let it all go…. Would that be the right thing….or would it be another mistake…
Do you believe in destiny?
Does it mean holding on? Or letting go? That you will hold on very tight in that love that as you do…you are letting go of it…Not only because the world is against you…Not because it isn’t right… but because… you are finally placing your hopes, your dreams and your love onto fate’s very hands…
Not because you are tired of fighting nor tired of loving…but because you simply believed in destiny…
….that no matter what place, what generation, what time and what lifetime…
When it is meant to be…..
……then it shall be….
Closing Cycles
by: Paolo Coelho
One always has to know when a stage comes to an end.
If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the
happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.
Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end?
Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad?
Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden?
If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the
happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.
Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end?
Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad?
Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden?
You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened. You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that.
But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister, everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.
None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when we try to understand the things that happen to us. What has passed will not return: we cannot for ever be children, late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents, lovers who day and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least intention of coming back.
Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away. That is why it is so important (however painful it maybe!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home. Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.
Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them. Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.
Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.
Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.
Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the ideal moment.
Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back. Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need. This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.
Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust. Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.
27.6.07
June Quotes
"I didn't understand how people manage to give something, expecting nothing in return. When I fell in love, I understood."
--submitted by Vinay Acharya
“I want to be remembered as the girl who always smiles even when her heart is broken, and the one that could always brighten up your day even if she couldn't brighten her own.”
“The worst thing about getting your heart broken is going to sleep and knowing you're going to wake up and nothing has changed”
“You don't die of a broken heart, you only wish you did.”
Marilyn Peterson quotes
“Now I know I've got a heart, because it's breaking.”
Tin Woodsman quotes
“Sometimes I wish I were a kid again; skinned knees are a lot easier to fix than a broken heart.”
“Always tell people how you feel about them. If you tell them, it may break your heart, but by saying nothing you might break theirs.”
“Love that we can not have is the one that lasts the longest, hurts the deepest and feels the strongest...”
“When love is lost, do not bow your head in sadness; instead keep your head up high and gaze at the stars for that is where your broken heart has been sent to heal!”
“It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise”
Sara Teasdale quotes
“Things don't go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.”
Samuel Johnson quotes
“You may not love me today, tomorrow, or ever, but I will love you until it kills me, and, even then, you'll be in my heart.”
“Love is not written on paper, for paper can be erased. Nor is it etched on stone, for stone can be broken. But it is inscribed on a heart and there it shall remain forever.”
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love.”
Washington Irving quotes
“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”
Roy Croft quotes
Love is like the truth, sometimes it prevails, sometimes it hurts
Victor M. Garcia Jr.
If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.
Sir James M. Barrie
"We may meet our soul mates by Chance
but loving and staying with our soul mates is still a
Choice we have to make."
but loving and staying with our soul mates is still a
Choice we have to make."
"When you lose someone...
and you think you were the
one who loved most,
between the two of you... he lost more.
For someday you can
love someone the way that you loved him...
But he will never be loved again the way that you did."
and you think you were the
one who loved most,
between the two of you... he lost more.
For someday you can
love someone the way that you loved him...
But he will never be loved again the way that you did."
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