M: On Peacemaking→
“Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?” – Kahlil Gibran
The peacemaker in my soul is paces in the backroom, tirelessly at work and often met with failure. To negotiate between logic and love; to choose with wisdom and also clarity.
It is not easy.
” Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes. “
Erikson: We deserve more than moderation.
“You keep telling me about moderation. That a little is enough. But sometimes for some of us, a little is not enough. Because, when it comes to something like wild walks or vulnerability or truth or heart – racing conversation or ecstatic contemplation or mind bending intimacy or all that catapults us into the flow, form and timelessness of our own aliveness, I am telling you that we deserve more than moderation.”
Victoria Erickson
2014.08.26 On Risk-Taking
“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” ― Randy Komisar, Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur
I am so worried that I wont be able to make heads or tails of my life. That I won’t make a difference, that my life won’t matter. I grind every day to make money doing something I have no real passion for. The only thing that keeps me going is staying up late working myself into the ground in the empty hours of the day
I frantically fill up the empty hours of the day with more work–an attempt to build something that I can eventually create a life of meaning around.
Am I being complacent? Am I playing it safe?
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Thoreau
2012.08.29 On Making Enemies
“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” – Winston Churchill
I stand for integrity and honesty. I will not back down from holding and giving the truth, or making myself available to it from others. I will do the difficult work of standing up for whats right, even if it is not easy. I will work tirelessly even if it intimidates others.
I will not dim my light to make you more comfortable.
I will not play small in the world.
“Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping… waiting… and though unwanted… unbidden… it will stir… open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us… guides us… passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love… the clarity of hatred… and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we’d know some kind of peace… but we would be hollow… Empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we’d be truly dead.” – Joss Whedon
“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue…
But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”
— Carl Sagan