Slow Down

I’d love to be able to detach my work and my life. To be able to view my career as a job like a lot of my friends do. To be able to entirely switch off at 6pm and enter ‘personal life’ mode. Please send advice! I do have a problem with working too much, but mostly because I love it…but it’s also important to switch off, to touch grass, to swim in the sea, to wander the streets of Lisbon aimlessly without a phone for six hours on a Saturday afternoon.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”



Your unlimited desires are clouding your peace.

The whole thing weighs on me like heavy cloth and I begin to feel the gravitational pull of busywork, the need for the affirmation of a thumbs up or little red heart on social media

 Our modern obsession with personal branding and self-commodification wants us to flatten ourselves into something someone else can understand in five seconds, but that’s just not how people are, and it seems cruel to deem anyone so simple, least of all ourselves.

Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.

You will receive a body. You may like it or not but it is yours for the entire time you’re on Earth. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called “life.” Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much as the process as the experiment that ultimately works. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. Then you can go on to the next lesson. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned. “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that is, again, better than “here.” Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need – what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust. You will forget all this. You can remember whenever you want.