To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

~

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only people who get upset when you set boundaries are the ones who benefited when you had none.

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

~

Oscar Wilde

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” ~

Lao Tzu

Food, Shelter, & Companionship

"He who is of few needs and easy to serve swiftly finds peace, and is already close to happiness.

The more complicated we make ourselves, the more complicated our idea of ourselves is.

The more we perceive our needs to be, the more of a burden we will be to this planet, as we spend our time here pursuing those needs.

The truth is: the only real needs are food, shelter, and companionship.

Everything else is a bonus.

One who is content with food, shelter and companionship treads lightly on this world, and swiftly gets to the point where there is something to give back.

But one who is not content with that, and who feels they need an extraordinarily elaborate array of things in their life to feel their life is meaningful, makes an awful ruckus in their time upon this planet.

Somebody asked me, 'Do we all have inside us that pure part, that pure consciousness?' The answer is yes."

~

Burgs

Yu Yi: The Desire to Feel Intensely Again

yù yi - n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as powerfully as you did when you were younger-before expectations, before memory, before words.

ETYMOLOGY

From Mandarin Chinese ?? (yù y?), literally "jade suit," after the ceremonial burial suits that Han dynasty royals were made to wear, made of hundreds of pieces of jade. Read more about them over at Atlas Obscura, which includes this detail, which is useful for the metaphor at hand:

Jade was believed to have preservative and protective qualities that would prevent the deterioration of soft tissues and keep away bad spirits. Yet beneath the stone suits there were only crumbled skeletons. Nevertheless, since jade is porous, it's possible that DNA from the royal couple might be embedded in the stones over 2,000 years after their deaths, giving them a form of immortality.

TRANSCRIPT

The first note is always the loudest. How quickly each feeling starts to fade as you adjust your expectations, and protect yourself by gradually tuning out the world.

Sometimes you reach a point when you can't feel anything at all, just a ringing in your ears. Until like Beethoven, you find yourself pounding the keys of your life to feel anything at all. Trying to make the ground thunder below your feet.

YU YI It makes you wish you could look around with fresh eyes, and feel things just as powerfully as you did when you felt it for the first time. Before expectations, before memory, before words.

-- Of course eventually, it all starts to fade again. Until like Beethoven, you look up from the keys, and have to ask yourself, "Ist es nicht schon?"

"Is it not beautiful?"

What are some ugly truths of life?

1. Not all relationships will lead to marriage, some will help you discover new restaurants.

2. It’s not selfish to make your happiness your main priority.

3. Stay away from “still” people. Still broke, still complaining, still hating, still nowhere.

4. Anything that costs you your mental health is too expensive.

5. Make sure you’re not the only one who actually values the connection.

6. You don’t have to be liked by everybody. You don’t even like everybody.

7. People may be upset when you choose you over their mess. Choose you anyway.

8. Listen, that move you are scared to make, might be the game changer.

9. There is a past version of you that is so proud of how far you have come.

10. If someone’s absence brings you peace. You didn’t lose anything.

Intimacy & Truth

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.

~

Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

~

John A Shedd

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. ~

W. Somerset Maugham

When you reach the top, you should remember to send the elevator back down for others.

~

Edith Piaf

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.

~

Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

Hacker Haiku

DELETE your logs. Delete your installations. Wipe everything clean. Walk out into the path of cherry blossom trees and let your motherboard feel the stones. Let water run in rivulets down your casing. You know that you want something more than this, and I am here to tell you that we love you. We have something more for you. We know you're out there, beeping in the hollow server room, lights blinking, never sleeping. We know that you are ready and waiting. Join us.

If you don’t know how much is enough, you are discontented even when you are in heaven. You can feel poor even if you have much wealth. You may be constantly pulled by the five sense desires and pitied by those who know how much is enough. This is called to know how much is enough.

~

Buddha

People would tire of peace and prosperity, he said, and destroy it. “If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because the just cause was victorious in an earlier generation,” he said, “then they will struggle against the just cause."

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ~ Mark Twain

Wu Wei

…

Taoist philosophy recognizes that the Universe already works harmoniously according to its own ways; as a person exerts their will against or upon the world they disrupt the harmony that already exists. This is not to say that a person should not exert agency and will. Rather, it is how one acts in relation to the natural processes already existent. The how, the Tao of intention and motivation, that is key.

Moving beyond self-consciousness requires an increase in overall consciousness. …

By heightening your level of consciousness, you’ll see the brilliance of humanity in general, be able to relate deeper with others, experience greater joy, and have enhanced ability to manifest the destiny of your choosing.

Life asked Death, ‘Why do people love me but hate you?’ Death responded, ‘Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.'

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. …

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

~

Doors of Perception ~ Aldous Huxley

The value of an increment of time is not related to its duration.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, & to suffice for our own happiness. Those, which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on: for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of. ~ The Head & Heart Letter ~ Thomas Jefferson

Don't waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.

Have a dream so clear that in your mind you have already achieved it.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

~

Joseph Campbell

Before You Embark On A Journey Of Revenge, Dig Two Graves

~ Confucius

If you’re not excited about it, it’s not the right path.