Wisdom

“I don’t like the term ‘success.’ It implies finality that has always felt misleading. We all live many lives, the experience of each compounding on the next. The attachment to a singular end-state defined by a milestone in a career seriously misses greater existential truths for me that are more interested in experimentation, iteration, and circularity.” — Ara Katz

Your future self is watching you right now through your memories.

“Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit the evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now. You are not some disinterested bystander. Participate. Exert yourself.” — Epictetus

“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.” — Miyamoto Musashi

"My approach to what I do in my job… and it might even be the approach to my life… is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing.



That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference…because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something… a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career.



Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important."



— Mads Mikkelsen

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.


— James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the music of the cosmos, we are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments, and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.

When the end arrives, it’s really the beginning.

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.



It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.



It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.



I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.



I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.



I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.



It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.



I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.



If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.



I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.



I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’



It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.



It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.



It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.



I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.