Give me the gift of a listening heart.
Romantic love releases surges of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine and activates brain regions that drive the reward system in a way that is similar to addiction.
Everything that has ever happened to us is in total agreement with our secret thoughts and its emotions.
Your thoughts mixed by your words are the building blocks of your physical realities of life.
And the family you choose? That’s the strongest love of all.
Family dysfunction is like fire in the woods that rolls generation to generation taking everything in its path until one person has the courage to face the flame. That person brings peace to her ancestors and spares those who follow.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. – VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory: A Memoir.
We are, from a purely biological perspective, simply breathing pieces of defecating meat, no more significant or enduring than a lizard or a potato.
Although we typically take our cultural worldview for granted, it is actually a fragile human construction that people spend great energy creating, maintaining, and defending. Since we’re constantly on the brink of realizing that our existence is precarious, we cling to our culture’s governmental, educational, and religious institutions and rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal.
We know, if only vaguely and inchoately, that our finest and most memorable experiences may never, and indeed, ultimately will never, happen again. That is why we cherish them so.
Our longing to transcend death inflames violence toward each other.
This realization threatens to put us in a persistent state of existential fear.
We can reflect on the fact that each of us is, in Otto Rank’s lovely words, a “temporal representative.
If you can afford the finer things in life, people pay attention to you. You feel special. Your self-esteem, that critical bulwark against the fear of death, rises.
Living up to cultural roles and values – whether we are called “doctor,” “lawyer,” “architect,” “artist,” or “beloved mother” – embeds us safely in a symbolic reality in which our identity helps us transcend the limits of our fleeting biological existence. Self-esteem is thus the foundation of psychological fortitude for us all.
A complementary death-denying strategy is the belief in a personal and personified savior. From a child’s perspective, parents are gigantic and seemingly all-powerful beings with a knack for showing up whenever bodily or emotional needs arise. It’s natural, therefore, for a young mind to also believe in stories about omnipotent beings interceding in matters of life and death.
From the child of five to myself is but a step,” Leo Tolstoy observed, “but from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.
There are weeks and weeks of memories poured into that kiss, long nights and early mornings and road trips that never led us back to where we started. Arguments and truces and theories.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not learn on your understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will straight your paths.
It’s vital to learn to stay with your emotions, even the strong or painful ones. Emotions demand attention, not action. Hold steady. Observe. Breathe.
When your partner raises a concern with you about you, the process goes much better if you remember that attending to this concern is not the same thing as agreeing with this concern. Rather than closing yourself off by defending or rationalizing, you can remain open to your partner.