Busy is just a euphemism for being so focused on what you don’t have that you never notice what you do.
We don’t know what reality is,” Rayanne says. “We just pretend we do, because it makes us feel like we’re in control.
We are so lucky to have our children, even for a little while, but we take them for granted. We make the stupid assumption that as long as we are here, they will be, too, though that’s never been part of the contract.
In the absence of knowledge, the mind is an amazing Tilt-A-Whirl of worst-case scenarios.
It’s amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It’s standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It’s the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love. But just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t make it any less real.
All of us are grieving something. But while we are, we’re putting one foot in front of the other. We’re waking up to see another day. We’re pushing through uncertainty, even if we can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel. We are battered and broken, but we’re all small miracles.
Inside was my father’s wallet, his reading glasses, his wedding ring. Identity, insight, heart: the only things we leave behind.
What we want is for everyone to just wear a mask. But then there are people who say that requiring a mask is a gross infringement of their bodily rights. I don’t know how to make it any more clear: you don’t have any bodily rights when you’re dead.
The Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. Those who experience a trauma pass it along to their children and their grandchildren, and then the memory fades.
Life happens when you least expect it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a blueprint in your back pocket.
Okay, but what if death wasn’t the ending you’ve been told it is? What if time is like fabric, a bolt that’s so long you can’t see where it starts or it ends?” She pauses. “Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it’s like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.
Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you’re looking at until it’s right under your eye.
You may not be able to choose your reality. But you can change it.
It takes a dozen bees to gather enough nectar to make a teaspoon of honey, each of them alighting on roughly 2,600 flowers and flying 850 miles back and forth. A worker bee weighs little more than a breath – around 100 milligrams – but she can carry half her body weight in nectar.
Build your scaffolding again, but while you’re conscious. Use the bricks that you’ve still got, in spite of the pandemic. Make coffee in the morning. Meditate. Watch Schitt’s Creek. Have a glass of wine at dinner. FaceTime the friends you can’t see in person. Whatever habits you used to have, stack them up and give yourself structure. I promise. You won’t feel as unsettled.
Nobody’s all good or all bad. They just get painted that way.
It’s not having the adventures or crossing off the line items of the bucket list. It’s who you were with, who will help you recall it when your memory fails.
Whatever we forfeit echoes the pain from all the other times we have been disappointed in our lives.
Did you know playing Ping-Pong activates your brain more than any other sport?
If you want to understand something, you first need to accept the fact of your own ignorance.