Monday, December 7, 2015

Vs.



Heart is racing fast.
It's beating, I know that for sure.
Will it come out?
Is it knocking at my chest,
demanding an appearance in the show?
All is well in the outbuilding, or so it seems.
Does my heart know something my mind does not?
Can my mind be peaceful while my body aches,
diaphragm struggles and I fall short of breath?
Perhaps the imminence of the truth ...
or as some like to call it, doom.

Familiarity

"Habit! That skillful but very slow housekeeper who begins by letting our mind suffer for weeks in a temporary arrangement, but whom we are nevertheless truly happy to discover, for without habit our mind, reduced to no more than its own resources, would be powerless to make a lodging habitable."

"...none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament, our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part."

Marcel Proust in "Swann's Way", about the mind creating habit and familiarity with objects and people.

Speaking of familiarity, go listen to "Familiarity" by the Punch Brothers.
Familiarity - Punch Brothers (youtube)

Friday, February 6, 2015

Allow stillness

"Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and the hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around me or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some travellers' wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would ahve been. They were no time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance."

- Walden

Monday, February 2, 2015

Pheonix

Through the complete breakdown of all that I know, I can rise from the ashes and learn to grow.

This is what I have realized I must work on every day of my life:

1. I have to know myself before I can know others.
2. Once I know my past, I can know who I am right now.
3. Once I know who I am right now, I can figure out where I am going.
4. I make my own path, but I have made the path until now and I must know what path that is.
5. I must assert the power that I have, or else it will lay dormant until it bursts with negativity.
6. When another becomes my crutch, I lose all responsibility for myself. I must be responsible.
7. Living my life to the fullest helps those around me live to their highest potential.
8. Believing myself first, will make me credible to those around me.
9. To gain experience, I must actually do. I can only know if I enjoy the experience after doing.
10. I must live in the moment to truly appreciate things for myself, not for someone else.
11. Life is uncertainty. I must realize this and all will fall into place with less resistance.
12. It is not about the amount of time, it is about the quality of time. The essence of time.
13. Every person I meet is an opportunity to learn about myself and to show them who I really am.
14. Let go of old patterns that don't lend to me in this day and age.
15. If I love something, I must let it go.