For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones.
Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.
The real trick to producing great work isn’t to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it’s to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We’re all in deep water. Which is fine: it’s by far the most exciting place to be.
Resisting a task is usually a sign that it’s meaningful-which is why it’s awakening your fears and stimulating procrastination. You could adopt “Do whatever you’re resisting the most” as a philosophy of life.
Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.
The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.
True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity – in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.
Ask yourself whether you are happy’, observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, ‘and you cease to be so.’ At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.
Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.
Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.
Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent.
Uncertainty is where things happen.
Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”.
It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort.
What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.
We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them; their flourishing depends on a certain degree of not being protected, of being open to experiences both negative and positive.
Bereaved people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss.
I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.