Cracks In Relationship Quotes

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.

Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

Because I can't help doing it," he said with a shrug. "And hey, if I keep loving you, maybe you'll eventually crack and love me too. Hell, I'm pretty sure you're already half in love with me." "I am not! And everything you just said is ridiculous. That's terrible logic." Adrian returned to his crossword puzzle. "Well, you can think what you want, so long as you remember-no matter how ordinary things seem between us-I'm still here, still in love with you, and care about you more than any other guy, evil or otherwise, ever will." "I don't think you're evil." "See? Things are already looking promising.

Do not hold your breath for anyone, Do not wish your lungs to be still, It may delay the cracks from spreading, But eventually they will. Sometimes to keep yourself together You must allow yourself to leave, Even if breaking your own heart Is what it takes to let you breathe.

Fairness isn’t about charity. It’s smart business.

Bias in the workplace is a form of tribalism – you’re either in or out

The imbalance of power in the employee-employer relationship puts the onus on leaders to address fairness at work

Perceptions of unfairness operate on a continuum

Real leadership is treating your least favorite employee the same as your favorite

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtub full of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. you had to have him. and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. don’t lose too much weight. stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. heart like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.

If we want to add human interaction to the panorama of our lifescape, the sustainability and the expectancy description of our emotions are momentous. Cracks in relations can be "restored," whereas breakups have to be "repaired." For 'repairs,' we need proper tools, respectively, concrete commitments, and endurance. For 'restoration,' we need exceptional talent and subtle adroitness to realize a perfect replica of the original emotional canvas. ("Life with sea view")

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

Except even at the start, when we were in that can't-get-enough-of-you-phase, there was like some invisible wall between us. At first I tried to take it down, but it took so much effort to even make cracks. And then I got tired of trying. Then I justified it. This was just how adult relationships were, how love felt once you had a few battle scars.

When relationships become tempestuous, and our hearts cannot endure the cracks of emotional blizzards, we must retreat for a while into the rabbit hole of our inner world to foster insight, redeem ourselves, and recover mental balance. (“The Infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)

Sometimes you met someone that changed the pattern, who wormed their way past the cracks in your heart, caulked them up, sealed themselves in, and stayed there. Sometimes they did it by insisting you meet them at every step, as Jamie had done to me.

There is a relationship between the eye contacts we make and the perceptions that we create in our heads, a relationship between the sound of another's voice and the emotions that we feel in our hearts, a relationship between our movements in space all around us and the magnetic pulls we can create between others and ourselves. All of these things (and more) make up the magic of every ordinary day and if we are able to live in this magic, to feel and to dwell in it, we will find ourselves living with magic every day. These are the white spaces in life, the spaces in between the written lines, the cracks in which the sunlight filters into. Some of us swim in the overflowing of the wine glass of life, we stand and blink our eyes in the sunlight reaching unseen places, we know where to find the white spaces, we live in magic.

i have never understood. will probably never understand. the white mans lust to eat the world. to eat the universe. (mars is next) why he was born with such a rabid starvation. why he feigns for power like crack rock. doing everything. and anything. to have it. no matter how deranged. why he is in so much pain he needs to rip the roots of happiness from the earth and burn them into his smile. what happened in his relationship with our mother. that he needs to set a person on fire. watch them burn. to feel powerful. not every white man is born this way, but, it stands to remain there are many who are.

Too many doubts grow in the cracks of silence and separation.

He took a long drink, then grimaced. “I do not have a drinking problem,” he announced, his voice needlessly loud. “I have a Churchillian relationship with alcohol: I can crack jokes and govern England and do anything I want to do. Except not drink.

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.

I think everyone’s caught up in these narrow-minded worlds and they think their world exists in the center of the universe. Relationships only happen when it’s convenient. You have to walk on eggshells for people because that’s about how strong they are these days. And you can’t confront people, because if you do, that brittle shell of confidence will crack. So we all become passive cowards that carry a fake smile wherever we go because God forbid you let your guard down long enough for people to see your life isn’t perfect. That you have a few flaws. Because who wants to see that? My theory is everybody sucks. So, my conclusion is I don’t need anybody.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls--woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.

He's not the relationship kind or so I hear." "And do you want a relationship?" I asked her. "No." She laughed, dabbing her fry. "But I have a feeling with someone like him, you get one taste and you will always want more." "Sort of like crack?" Jacob suggested. "Or Cheetos," Brit supplied.

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

In the absence of love, sex ceases to be an instrument of intimacy and turns into a weapon causing dents and cracks in the relationship.

I reached down and picked up a baseball bat at my feet and I flung it as hard as it could. It circled and arced high in the air until it slammed against the side of the dining hall with a crack and fell. I sat down in the dirt. Then I lay down in the dirt. Because not only was there no trail to follow, there was no evidence he’d ever been here. There was no evidence any of them had been here.

No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media bullshit screaming that you're nothing on your own and you're a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, if you don't exist without someone else, you don't exist at all. And that doesn't just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I'd do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved good-bye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I'd still be the same person I am today.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception.

And me, standing under the splintered night, catching fractured glimpses into the black behind the black, hearing the prayers of stars, the angry whispers of the dark summer night. Its voice cracks, on your name. My eyes close, on your name.

Your soulmate wasn't suppose to be perfect. You were meant to see the cracks in her soul and fill them with what you have and she was meant to see yours. Together you would be complete.

The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons.

her grass seemed greener until a drought came and cracked the earth beneath you.

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs. I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work. Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait. - in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987

But I think that every time you hurt somebody you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening - and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything.

Bricks are independent but can work well with other, tough to crack, fiercely loyal and put in the right spot will hold anything and everything that you’ve ever held dear with the greatest of ease.

If you look close enough, you can see cracks in everything. And that's okay. Because when you really think about it, it's the cracks and gaps and chinks in things that let the light shine in.

Everything I have become, everything I will ever accomplish cannot compare to my most impressive feat: I have loved you fiercely and assiduously with the very marrow inside my bones. So that when I die, they can crack them to find you there. So that when I die, they can open me up and see your name tattooed on the wall of my heart. So that when I die, my epitaph will neither commemorate who I was nor what I did, but will read: “She loved. And loved. And loved.” And so, I smile now, because that is no small thing.

I am no blank slate for love to write on. My heart has walls marred with cracks, bloodstains, and bullet holes; graffitied over by past lovers.

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they fill the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.—Barbara Bloom

We see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs.

Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. And aren’t these flaws the prerequisites of intimacy?

during my worst times on the park benches in the jails or living with whores I always had this certain contentment- I wouldn't call it happiness- it was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occuring and it helped in the factories and when relationships went wrong with the girls. it helped through the wars and the hangovers the backalley fights the hospitals. to awaken in a cheap room in a strange city and pull up the shade- this was the craziest kind of contentment and to walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirror- see myself, ugly, grinning at it all. what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

[T]he parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with cherries on top. And chocolate shavings and those little silver balls that cracked your fillings.

Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.

People annoy the crap out of me," he says. "I think people are nervous and loud and rude and selfish and stupid pretty much all the time." [...] "If they're beautiful they know it, so they don't bother having a personality or associating with people that don't fit into their league or can't afford their company. And, somehow these people are the most popular, which makes absolutely no sense. People try so hard to be accepted, they turn into a walking stereotype. They're pathetically easy to predict. They're insecure and try to mask it with whatever product corporate America is currently making and they always let you down. Just give them enough time, and they will." [...] "I think everyone's caught up in these narrow-minded worlds and they think their world exists in the center of the universe. Relationship only happen when it's convenient. You have to walk on eggshells for people because that's how strong they are these days. And you can't confront people, because if you do, that brittle shell of confidence will crack. So we all become passive cowards that carry a fake smile wherever we go because God forbid you let your guard down long enough for people to see your life isn't perfect. That you have a few flaws. Because who wants to see that?

You know, we have moments of passion when we are in pain. And then of course the moment ends, and with it the passion and the pain, and we forgive and forget. But I think that every time you hurt somebody that you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening - and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything.

I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.

FRIDA KAHLO TO MARTY MCCONNELL leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtub full of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. you had to have him. and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. don’t lose too much weight. stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. heart like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.

Every day try to convert your reactions to responses. Reactions are always instinctive, whereas responses are always well thought of, just and right to save a situation from going out of hands, to avoid cracks in relationship, to avoid taking decisions in anger, anxiety, stress or hurry.

Perhaps I didn’t voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending.

I know it hurts. But, girl, right now you need to see how much better you can do than Becker with a small pecker." I crack and can't hold back the tiny smile. "He does have a small wiener." "See? And you would’ve been stuck with that for the rest of your life! There are so many better guys out there. Guys who come packing.

Couples stray,” said Edgar. “Part of the breaking-in process.” “Not breaking in, breaking.” Nicola differed sharply. “You can glue people together again. But then your relationship’s like any other repaired object, with cracks, blobs of epoxy, a little askew. It’s never the same. I can see you haven’t a notion what I’m on about, so you’ll have to take my word for it.” “Christ, you’re a babe in the woods.” Edgar stopped slicing tomatoes. “You got it ass-backward. A marriage perched like porcelain on the mantelpiece is doomed. Sooner or later grown-ups treat each other like shit. You gotta be able to kick the thing around, less like china than an old shoe—bam, under the bed, or walk it through some puddles. No love’s gonna last it if can’t take abuse.

You possess strength, resilience, tenacity, endurance, and willpower as you have lived through a cracking mess.

I had always been a sensitive person with tons of little cracks and as strong and self-reliant as I could act, it took very little for someone to enter those cracks and hurt me.

Why were men such complicated beasts anyway? Relationships felt like full-time babysitting jobs crossed with high-level code cracking.

Every time we open one door, we close another. It's lovely to spend Sunday morning with our new love, cooking breakfast and taking a walk together. But in the midst of our happiness, we may feel nostalgia for our former Sunday morning ritual of uninterrupted time alone at a favorite restaurant reading the newspaper. We need to acknowledge the presence of both excitement and loss, to feel their rhythm as they ebb and flow through a new relationship. If we try to deny our losses, they lead to resentments, a gnawing discomfort, and a desire to withdraw. Yet we also need to remind our ego that love means letting go of our entrenched rituals, of comparing, of wanting life to stay the same...Entering a relationship and living in the heart of the Beloved means our life will change, our shells will crack open and we will never be the same again.

Okay, let's recap. So I lost a few good things, but wait; There's other fish in the sea. And my heart's still here: the bait. It has a few cracks And a couple of shark bites, But it's alright. A bleeding heart is never one to wait in the water for long. I wonder what my next catch will be..

I think everyone's caught up in these narrow-minded worlds and they think their world exists in the center of the universe. Relationships only happen when it's convenient. You have to walk on eggshells for people because that's about how strong they are these days. And you can't confront people, because if you do, that brittle shell of confidence will crack. So we all become passive cowards that carry a fake smile wherever we go because God forbid you let your guard down long enough for people to see your life isn't perfect. That you have a few flaws. Because who wants to see that?

I read things that male relationship experts write about women and I read things that female relationship experts write about men, then I feel a true sadness in my heart. Why can’t there be a simple, pure, direct openness? Why can’t there be a simple, real, open trust? The truth is that male or female, gay or straight— we are all people— we have all been broken and put back together in so many different ways... it’s really just about learning how to recognize the sound of the other one's cracks. And that’s what it’s really about, just that.

Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn't define you, I thought. I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead.

Your life is written in indelible ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed. But if look closer, you notice the ink never really dries on any our experiences. They can change their meaning the longer you look at them. Klexos. There are ways of thinking about the past that aren't just nostalgia or regret. A kind of questioning that enriches an experience after the fact. To dwell on the past is to allow fresh context to trickle in over the years, and fill out the picture; to keep the memory alive, and not just as a caricature of itself. So you can look fairly at a painful experience, and call it by its name. Time is the most powerful force in the universe. It can turn a giant into someone utterly human, just trying to make their way through. Or tell you how you really felt about someone, even if you couldn't at the time. It can put your childhood dreams in context with adult burdens or turn a universal consensus into an embarrassing fad. It can expose cracks in a relationship that once seemed perfect. Or keep a friendship going by thoughts alone, even if you'll never see them again. It can flip your greatest shame into the source of your greatest power, or turn a jolt of pride into something petty, done for the wrong reasons, or make what felt like the end of the world look like a natural part of life. The past is still mostly a blank page, so we may be doomed to repeat it. But it's still worth looking into if it brings you closer to the truth. Maybe it's not so bad to dwell in the past, and muddle in the memories, to stem the simplification of time, and put some craft back into it. Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas. And remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

Friendship is a two-way street, where both hearts beat in harmony, sharing laughter and tears in equal measure. When one side bears the weight of affection, the foundation cracks, and the bond begins to fade. Mutuality is the lifeblood of true friendship, where give and take dance in balance, nourishing a connection that stands the test of time.

A Wild Woman Is Not A Girlfriend. She Is A Relationship With Nature. But can you love me in the deep? In the dark? In the thick of it? Can you love me when I drink from the wrong bottle and slip through the crack in the floorboard? Can you love me when I’m bigger than you, when my presence blazes like the sun does, when it hurts to look directly at me? Can you love me then too? Can you love me under the starry sky, shaved and smooth, my skin like liquid moonlight? Can you love me when I am howling and furry, standing on my haunches, my lower lip stained with the blood of my last kill? When I call down the lightning, when the sidewalks are singed by the soles of my feet, can you still love me then? What happens when I freeze the land, and cause the dirt to harden over all the pomegranate seeds we’ve planted? Will you trust that Spring will return? Will you still believe me when I tell you I will become a raging river, and spill myself upon your dreams and call them to the surface of your life? Can you trust me, even though you cannot tame me? Can you love me, even though I am all that you fear and admire? Will you fear my shifting shape? Does it frighten you, when my eyes flash like your camera does? Do you fear they will capture your soul? Are you afraid to step into me? The meat-eating plants and flowers armed with poisonous darts are not in my jungle to stop you from coming. Not you. So do not worry. They belong to me, and I have invited you here. Stay to the path revealed in the moonlight and arrive safely to the hut of Baba Yaga: the wild old wise one… she will not lead you astray if you are pure of heart. You cannot be with the wild one if you fear the rumbling of the ground, the roar of a cascading river, the startling clap of thunder in the sky. If you want to be safe, go back to your tiny room — the night sky is not for you. If you want to be torn apart, come in. Be broken open and devoured. Be set ablaze in my fire. I will not leave you as you have come: well dressed, in finely-threaded sweaters that keep out the cold. I will leave you naked and biting. Leave you clawing at the sheets. Leave you surrounded by owls and hawks and flowers that only bloom when no one is watching. So, come to me, and be healed in the unbearable lightness and darkness of all that you are. There is nothing in you that can scare me. Nothing in you I will not use to make you great. A wild woman is not a girlfriend. She is a relationship with nature. She is the source of all your primal desires, and she is the wild whipping wind that uproots the poisonous corn stalks on your neatly tilled farm. She will plant pear trees in the wake of your disaster. She will see to it that you shall rise again. She is the lover who restores you to your own wild nature.

So what is the fallout for dogs of the Lassie myth? As soon as you bestow intelligence and morality, you bestow the responsibility that goes along with them. In other words, if the dog knows it’s wrong to destroy furniture yet deliberately and maliciously does it, remembers the wrong he did and feels guilt, it feels like he merits a punishment2, doesn’t it? That’s just what dogs have been getting - a lot of punishment. We set them up for all kinds of punishment by overestimating their ability to think. Interestingly, it’s the “cold” behaviorist model that ends up giving dogs a much better crack at meeting the demands we make of them. The myth gives problems to dogs they cannot solve and then punishes them for failing. And the saddest thing is that the main association most dogs have with that punishment is the presence of their owner. This puts a pretty twisted spin on loooving dogs ‘cause they’re so smart, doesn’t it?

If the universe doesn't remember, why should you? Being the youngest of three siblings, you can bet I was the subject of some vile comments. Fat, stupid, you name it. However, just because my brother called me an idiot for 12 years doesn't make it my reality. Your past never equals your future unless you allow it. Think about a coin flip. No matter how many times it's flipped, the next flip is always random. Probability cannot be attached to a future flip based on the past. Your past is the same. Just because you failed at five relationships doesn't mean your next will fail, especially if you learn from them! Just because you flipped burgers three hours ago doesn't mean you can't be a millionaire next year. The universe forgets, just like the universe forgot I mopped floors and delivered pizza not long ago.

People love to apply themselves to games, jobs, relationships, politics, to create the illusion of meaning...If I can just heal my shoulder, then I could be a quarterback! If only I could finish this documentary and tell the story of my great-uncle to the world; then I would matter. If I was a movie star, then I would exist. People will light a crack pipe or steal a television just to try and feel that they exist

The relationship moved fast, I was swept off my feet. He seemed so perfect, everything I had ever dreamt of. His family lovebombed me and used my son to hook me. From the start the unusual family ways triggered my intuition. My concerns were swept under and distractions filled the cracks.

It’s better worth being late for a chance of winning you than being in time for any other girl in the world. Don’t cry, my dear. If it’s for me, I’m a hard nut to crack; and I take it standing up. If that other fellow doesn’t know his happiness, well, he’d better look for it soon, or he’ll have to deal with me. Little girl, your honesty and pluck have made me a friend, and that’s rarer than a lover; it’s more unselfish anyhow. My dear, I’m going to have a pretty lonely walk between this and Kingdom Come. Won’t you give me one kiss? It’ll be something to keep off the darkness now and then.

I never gained control of my mind—how do you dominate an ocean?—but I began to form a real relationship with it. Through writing and meditation I identified monkey mind, that constant critic, commentator, editor, general slug and pain-in-the-ass, the voice that says, “I can’t do this, I’m bored, I hate myself, I’m no good, I can’t sit still, who do I think I am?” I saw that most of my life had been spent following that voice as though it were God, telling me the real meaning of life—“Natalie, you can’t write shit”—when, in fact, it was a mechanical contraption that all human minds contain.

No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media bullshit screaming that you're nothing on your own and you're a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, if you don't exist without someone else, you don't exist at all. And that doesn't just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I'd do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved goodbye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I'd still be the same person I am today. I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn't change who I am. This isn't something I'm proud of; as far as I'm concerned, it's a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.

I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love?

I did not attend any Academy so it is not my job to police you or try to catch you in any act. If I get to the point where I feel the need to do that, I'd rather just walk away cuz it means you've lost my trust and without that, we have nothing left. Our foundation is cracked and I'm not living in a shaky house.

Come to me in the dark, bring me all of your scars. I want to know every crack in your heart, every ache, every memory that haunts you. I want to see the realness in your face, the way your eyes stay light even when you talk of pain, and the way your lips are uneven when you smile. The grooves carved into your soul have made you beautiful and I want to run my fingers across the etches. I know people cover wounds and disguise their damage, but this is what makes you, you, and I want to know you. I want to sink inside of you and feel your depth. Don’t protect me from your story. We all have a story and I’m tired of drowning alone.

It cracks my heart wide open to think of all of us out there, wandering the world, so deeply hungry to be known. Defying our own disbelief in search of rest and respite. It is the most beautiful thing, this universal human longing. We have not given up on the idea that we might one day taste it, at least some sense of it. However brief. However transient. However impossible to hold. It might be out there, so we keep seeking. This, to me, is tremendously, tenderly, beautiful.

What this Life Practice has meant for me is better relationships, a better sense of self, better sex, better boundaries, better skin, more money, more time, more joy, more love. It’s given me purpose and fullness, and it means I have a lifetime ahead of me to evolve. I am ripe with possibility because I cracked open, and that is thrilling.

Octave staggered to his feet, his stick swinging back to point toward Nicholas. He felt a wave of heat and saw spellfire crackle along the length of polished wood, preparing itself for another explosive burst. Crack was moving toward Octave, but Madeline shouted, "Get back!" Nicholas ducked, as a shot exploded behind him. Octave fell backward on the carpet and the blue lightning flared once and vanished with a sharp crackle. Nicholas looked at Madeline. She stepped forward, holding a small double-action revolver carefully and frowning down at the corpse. He said, "I wondered what you were waiting for." "You were in my line of fire, dear," she said, preoccupied. "But look.

I felt an inner peace and softness. My Berlin Wall had been cracked; the toxic relationship between me and that critical voice had been severed.

Now and adult, allowed a glimpse of these first cracks in my family's perfect surface, I couldn't help but wonder what else I didn't understand about us all. p 60

Ring the bells that still can ring; forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.

The thirty-plus years of marriage between the ceiling and the cement plaster showed signs of weakness by the plaster’s frequently developing cracks and holes.

This is what I think about as I crack a Miller High Life and vaguely decide that I should not continue to have cyclical relationships with gross men,

Maybe those relationships cracked for a reason—to let the light in.

Real people have cracks. Perfect people have masks.

You know what I love? The spaces between I love you. The tap of your fork against the plate and how my cup of wine clicks against our table. The scratchy voice coming from the radio in the other room. The quiet sound of your hand reaching across the table and whispering over mine. How your voice sounds like your mouth on the back of my neck. The soft murmur of our easy conversation. Between these quiet Tuesday night routines, following every comma and right after every pause for breath, is I, love, and you. In the middle of every I love you is a sink full of dishes, whisper of socked feet tangled in white sheets, and gentle kisses against curved cheeks. We lyric ourselves into the laundry that needs to be finished, into the ends of every smile that follows me repeating your name. We write ourselves into the grocery bags we need to carry, the cracks running up our rented walls, the sides of the bed we choose to drag up the sails of heavy eyed dreams. Like the spaces between our fingers, in the spaces between I, love, and you, we wait. The in-betweens have always been my favorite.

The Mountain and the Squirrel The mountain and the squirrel Had a quarrel; And the former called the latter “Little Prig.” Bun replied, “You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I’m not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry, I’ll not deny you make A very pretty squirrel track; Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You learn a lot about relationships when your job, in some ways, is to break them up. But the truth is, almost every relationship has breaking points. Every relationship has fissures and cracks. That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless or bad or even wrong. We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray. Yet we somehow expect our relationships to never be anything but simple and pure.

For as long as I’d been dating, I’d had a mental flow chart, a schedule, of how things usually went. Relationships always started with that heady, swoonish period, where the other person is like some new invention that suddenly solves all life’s worst problems, like losing socks in the dryer or toasting bagels without burning the edges. At this phase, which usually lasts about six weeks max, the other person is perfect. But at six weeks and two days, the cracks begin to show; not real structural damage yet, but little things that niggle and nag. Like the way they always assume you’ll pay for your own movie, just because you did once, or how they use the dashboard of their car as an imaginary keyboard at long stoplights. Once, you might have thought this was cute, or endearing. Now, it annoys you, but not enough to change anything. Come week eight, though, the strain is starting to show. This person is, in fact, human, and here’s where most relationships splinter and die. Because either you can stick around and deal with these problems, or ease out gracefully, knowing that at some point in the not-too-distant future, there will emerge another perfect person, who will fix everything, at least for six weeks.

But I couldn’t block out the sound of his voice. “Hayden wasn’t the son I expected to have,” he said. “I’d imagined playing catch in the yard, watching football on the weekends, going fishing. The things I’d done with my dad; the things I do with Ryan. It was the only kind of relationship I knew how to have with a son.” His voice cracked. “But my second son didn’t enjoy any of those things. He loved music and video games and computers. I didn’t know how to talk to him. And now I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I’d learned how.” He lowered his head, as if he were trying to hide the fact that he was crying.

He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn't heard it yet.

Another shuddering inhale. God, this is hard. His blue warmth is starting to bleed through the cracks in the wall and I want to cry with relief. “I was a fucking coward,” I finish. And then—just when I was hoping a dam would burst—the wall just dissolves, letting the blue-green wash over me, clearing out the muck in my veins for the first time in months. “I feel like I should apologize too,” Adam starts, and I immediately jump in to stop him. “No, just let me,” he insists. Another deep breath in for both of us. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this—about us. And I think I was too wrapped up in my own shit before. I was so worried about making you feel sad that I didn’t think. I didn’t let you in. And I put a lot of pressure on you to be the stable one—the normal one—in the relationship, which is pretty fucking ironic. Your power is cool and everything

Similarly, forcing your beliefs onto someone else damages your relationship. The damage may not be easy to spot at first, like tiny cracks in a wooden wheel, but it’s just a matter of time before the wheel splits apart.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lover’s ultimate Möbius strip: But I only did it because I love you so much.

Every relationship has fissures and cracks. That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless or bad or even wrong. We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray. Yet we somehow expect our relationships to never be anything but simple and pure.

Just as I was about to close my eyes I saw a faint line connecting the shadows, like string you take into a forest so you don’t lose your way. Everything in the room was joined by one line; the frame to the curtain, the coil to the crack, the belt to the shoe. I closed my eyes and in the vision behind the skin of my lids I saw the line stretch way out to sea, like cobweb blown by the wind, further and further; it crossed the Pacific until the Pacific became the Indian and it found Robby in his ship. It touched his shoulder and moved across the sleeve of his shirt and up to his eyes and across the top of his head and then the line went to all the other men on the ship; then all the way back to me. Everyone was joined.

Things can be fixed. Relationship CANNOT. Its like standing on a cracked glass plane, you might just adjust yourself for the time being but there will always be a fear of increasing the cracks, fear of falling through, fear of being destroyed.

Every relationship, no matter how strong you believe it to be, is actually quite fragile. Those little cracks in the foundation of any relationship, be it a tiny white lie or something more, is enough to cause your world to come crumbling down when you least expect it.

We fell in. We fell in, stayed there long enough to desperately claim each other one more time in the dark underground beneath the cracked foundation of our relationship. And when we crawled out of the hole the next morning, we ended up on different sides where the earth had been cleaved in two.

Amma wanted her daughter to be free, feminist and powerful Later she took her on personal development courses for children to give her the confidence and articulacy to flourish in any setting Big mistake Mum, Yazz said at fourteen when she was pitching to go to Reading Music Festival with her friends, it would be to the detriment of my juvenile development if you curtailed my activities at this critical stage in my journey towards becoming the independent-minded and fully self-expressed adult you expect me to be, I mean, do you really want me rebelling against your old-fashioned rules by running away from the safety of my home to live on the streets and having to resort to prostitution to survive and thereafter drug addiction, crime, anorexia and abusive relationships with exploitative bastards twice my age before my early demise in a crack house? Amma fretted the whole weekend her little girl way away

THE RIVER OF A WOMAN Man is like a desert without the rain of a woman. Nothing can be born and grown without her nourishment. She is a life-giving river that gives and loves without holding anything back. And without her water, man would walk around aimlessly, feeling incomplete and hollow like an empty well. The longer he roams, the deeper the hole within his soul expands, growing bigger and bigger like a barren tree whose branches resemble the cracks on hard, dry soil. And he shall continue to feel incomplete and malnourished, until – he encounters a godly woman, to show him life and quench his thirst.

I think this kind of relationship is only possible when you are young enough to fully inhabit your body. When you are older there is more separation between yourself and your physicality. Your body lets you down, it creaks and cracks and aches, it often feels unfamiliar, but back then my body was me, and his body was him, and if our bodies loved each other, that was enough. Although, of course, it wasn’t. He was never cruel. Perhaps if his feelings had been articulated more specifically, I would have understood sooner the fundamental truth: This man simply does not like me. When you live with someone who dislikes you in a mostly unspecified way, you begin to dislike yourself too, especially if you are someone, like me, whose self-esteem, at least regarding my personality, has never been high. A different person, a stronger person, would not have allowed her sense of self to be blown away like grains of sand in the brisk winds of Perth.

When catastrophe strikes compassion and love unite. A storm can't break the spirit of love. A storm may crack your windows, tear off your roof, wreck your house, but it absolutely cannot destroy the foundation you hold within yourself. Stay strong. Stay rooted. Carry love in your heart, always, and know the sacred things in life can't be touched.

Still lying on the ground, half tingly, half stunned, I held my left hand in front of my face and lightly spread my fingers, examining what Marlboro Man had given me that morning. I couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful ring, or a ring that was a more fitting symbol of my relationship with Marlboro Man. It was unadorned, uncontrived, consisting only of a delicate gold band and a lovely diamond that stood up high--almost proudly--on its supportive prongs. It was a ring chosen by a man who, from day one, had always let me know exactly how he felt. The ring was a perfect extension of that: strong, straightforward, solid, direct. I liked seeing it on my finger. I felt good knowing it was there. My stomach, though, was in knots. I was engaged. Engaged. I was ill-prepared for how weird it felt. Why hadn’t I ever heard of this strange sensation before? Why hadn’t anyone told me? I felt simultaneously grown up, excited, shocked, scared, matronly, weird, and happy--a strange combination for a weekday morning. I was engaged--holy moly. My other hand picked up the receiver of the phone, and without thinking, I dialed my little sister. “Hi,” I said when Betsy picked up the phone. It hadn’t been ten minutes since we’d hung up from our last conversation. “Hey,” she replied. “Uh, I just wanted to tell you”--my heart began to race--“that I’m, like…engaged.” What seemed like hours of silence passed. “Bullcrap,” Betsy finally exclaimed. Then she repeated: “Bullcrap.” “Not bullcrap,” I answered. “He just asked me to marry him. I’m engaged, Bets!” “What?” Betsy shrieked. “Oh my God…” Her voice began to crack. Seconds later, she was crying. A lump formed in my throat, too. I immediately understood where her tears were coming from. I felt it all, too. It was bittersweet. Things would change. Tears welled up in my eyes. My nose began to sting. “Don’t cry, you butthead.” I laughed through my tears. She laughed it off, too, sobbing harder, totally unable to suppress the tears. “Can I be your maid of honor?” This was too much for me. “I can’t talk anymore,” I managed to squeak through my lips. I hung up on Betsy and lay there, blubbering on my floor.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

There is a spot in my foot I can’t feel. I stepped on a piece of glass and the nerves there are dead now. The doctor said they’d grow back, but it’s been years and that place is still numb. That was how my heart had felt for years. Like all the cracks callused over. That enabled me to focus on what mattered. I built a life for me and Libby, a home that no bank or ex-boyfriend could ever take from us. I watched my friends in relationships make compromise after compromise, shrinking into themselves until they were nothing but a piece of a whole, until all their stories came from the past, and their career aspirations, their friends, and their apartments were replaced by our aspirations, our friends, our apartment. Half lives that could be taken from them without any warning.

To the cycle of drama. You’re not that sure about him until he starts catering to your fear of abandonment and making you jump through hoops, and after a while, you’re not really going out with him, you’re going out with the high created by Relationship Crack. You’re the Fallback Girl that commits even though you weren’t really that interested until he started messing you around and got your attention.

The thing about marriages, bad ones especially, is the utter disregard with which the couple and those around them treat the cracks when they first emerge. Like tectonic plates that crush and grind against each other under the surface of the earth, the damage does not happen on one sunny morning when the earthquake hits. When a couple splits, it is the result of an inevitable break that has been brewing for years without respite.

Whether she was engaged, married or single, nothing could or ever would come of the weakness he was forced to acknowledge that he had developed. He would re-establish the professional distance that had somehow ebbed away with her drunken confessions and the camaraderie of their trip up north, and temporarily shelve his half-acknowledged plan to end the relationship with Elin. It felt safer just now to have another woman within reach, and a beautiful one at that, whose enthusiasm and expertise in bed ought surely to compensate for an undeniable incompatibility outside it. He fell to wondering how long Robin would continue working for him after she became Mrs. Cunliffe. Matthew would surely use every ounce of his husbandly influence to pry her away from a profession as dangerous as it was poorly paid. Well, that was her lookout: her bed, and she could lie in it. Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain, and delusion. Robin and Matthew had just two months to go before the wedding. There was still time.

Shall I stop in to check on Bella before I go?” “Not dressed like that. You would give her palpitations if she knew you were going into danger for her benefit.” “Luckily, I am mostly immune to Bella’s powers and could cure such palpitations with a thought,” Gideon mused. Jacob raised a brow, taking the medic’s measure. He could not recall the last time he had heard the Ancient crack wise about anything. It was not a wholly unpleasant experience, and it amused the Enforcer. “I . . . am aware of what is occurring between you and Legna, as you know,” Jacob mentioned with casual quiet. “I am only recently Imprinted myself, but should you require—” He broke off, suddenly uncomfortable. “Of course, you probably know far more about Imprinting than I ever will.” He is reaching out to you. Legna’s soft encouragement made Gideon suddenly aware of that fact. It was one of those nuances he would have missed completely, rusty as he was with matters of friendship and how to relate better to others. “I am glad for the offer of any help you can provide,” Gideon said quickly. “In fact, I had wanted to ask you . . . something . . .” What did I want to ask him? he asked Legna urgently. I do not know! I did not tell you to engage him, just to graciously accept his offer. Oh. My apologies. Still, you are clever enough to think of something, are you not? Legna knew he was baiting her, so she laughed. Ask him why it is you seem to constantly irritate me. I will ask him no such thing, Magdelegna. Well then, you had better come up with an alternative, because that is the only suggestion I have. “Yes?” Jacob was encouraging neutrally, trying to be patient as the medic seemed to gather his thoughts. “Do you find that your mate tends to lecture you incessantly?” he asked finally. Jacob laughed out loud. “You know something, I can actually advise you about that, Gideon.” “Can you?” The medic actually sounded hopeful. “Give up. Now. While you still have your sanity. Arguing with her will get you nowhere. And, also, never ever ask questions that refer to the whys and wherefores of women, females, or any other feminine-based criticism. Otherwise you will only earn an argument at a higher decibel level. Oh, and one other thing.” Gideon cocked a brow in question. “All the rules I just gave you, as well as all the ones she lays down during the course of your relationship, can and will change at whim. So, as I see it, you can consider yourself just as lost as every other man on the planet. Good luck with it.” “That is not a very heartening thought,” Gideon said wryly, ignoring Legna’s giggle in his background thoughts.

...we all have asymmetrical relationships with people far away, in space, in time, across the barrier between our real world and the shadow world which contains both our past and Holmes’s Valhalla. Worlds which are not real (past or imaginary) can still teach us, warn us, just as friends who are not with us can inspire us, push us, draw us into the unending teamwork of humanity, which has always crossed time’s diaspora. Sometimes we’re too tired, the friends around us absent or just tired too. But Thomas Hobbes is not too tired, nor loyal Watson, and while dead hands and imaginary hands can’t mend our pavement cracks, they can still sit beside us on the roughest nights and help us make it through. And if we love our imaginary worlds, if they stir passions in us, love, I think that makes us love this world the more, this world that created them, and that we remake with them.

And you?' 'Ah. I'm coping.' He said it simply, but it caused something in my heart to crack a little. 'It's not for ever,' I said, as we stopped. 'I know.' 'And we're going to do loads of fun stuff while you're here.' 'What have you got planned?' 'Um, basically it's You Getting Naked. Followed by supper. Followed by more You Getting Naked. Maybe a walk around Central Park, some corny tourist stuff, like the Staten Island ferry and Times Square, and some shopping in the East Village and some really good food with added You Getting Naked.' He grinned. 'Do I get You Getting Naked too?' 'Oh, yes, it's a two-for-one deal.' I leant my head against him. 'Seriously, though, I'd love you to come and see where I work. Maybe meet Nathan and Ashok and all the people I go on about. Mr and Mrs Gopnik will be out of town so you probably won't meet them but you'll at least get an idea of it all in your head.

Not only do you not do your best work in the “dangerously over-challenged” range, but if you stay in this range for very long, something in your life will break. I don’t care how resilient you are, how much energy you naturally possess, or how much mental toughness you think you have; something will break. You will not be exempt from this law. Your health, marriage, connection with your kids, relationship with God, emotional well-being—something is going to crack.

When there is a huge crack in your relationship with someone, you wonder what others do in similar situations. I realize I'm trying as hard as I can to present myself as the most unthreatening being in the world, like a small animal. I hunch into myself, avoiding going back to the same places I frequented with him. Obviously I don't eat the kind of food we ate or made together. But I don't think I'm going to move to a new house, because I have the kitchen and the large fridge that I'd wanted for so long. People say you can't possibly like your lover every single second of your life. But that's not true. I liked and looked to my lover every single second we were together. And I still can't admit that he's gone. True sorrow is when one person desires but the other doesn't. I don't know any better words to describe it, and I can't yet express this feeling through any kind of food. The one thing we know about sorrow is that it's a very personal, individual feeling.

I have been fascinated by some of the research I've done around relationships between abductors and abductees, sadly in some cases over many years, which has raised many questions: Is it always nature versus nurture? Is there an evil streak in some people and not others? Could it be a sequence of events over a short period that makes someone crack, or a whole life of bad things happening to them? And how would we ever know after the event anyway? That's what makes it so interesting to write crime fiction

And it's a case in point of the fact that these traditions—the mythology, the lore—are not being gone to as some kind of fixed, given entity that one then has to have a subservient relationship to. They are active and unfinished; they are subject to change; they are themselves in the process of transformation and transition. They speak to an open and open-ended possibility that the poetics that I've been involved in very much speaks to as well. To see cracks and incompleteness as not only inevitable but opportune.

Enoch asked Adam about the name he had uttered earlier, Yahweh Elohim. Adam apologized, “It slips out too often. It is the covenant name of Elohim. It is reserved for only the most sacred of relationships. It expresses his essence as the foundation of existence itself. The divine council of heavenly host uses it.” He paused for a moment. “We used it in the Garden, but now with the Edenic exile…” his voice cracked for a moment. “It is a name that should remain secret until latter days. For what purpose, I do not know. Perhaps it has to do with the seed of Eve.

One of the things that Ed loved so much about guitar was that suddenly, he had more control over his sound—he had more nuanced ways to express himself because he was now in charge of the strings themselves. “With a guitar you can bend or use vibrato to reach all those microtonal notes and those feelings that fall between the cracks on the piano,” is how Ed put it. “There’s a touch involved with the piano, but you’re not actually touching the strings. So there’s an agent between you and the strings—a middleman.” Ed could now enjoy an unmediated relationship with his instrument, and he made the most of that.

Each time she boarded the train that would take her away from Linares and from Francisco, she was beset with the unpleasant feeling that, in her absence, their relationship would change and she would be left outside, like an intruder in her own home, a voyeur who can only look in through a crack in a closed window. She was afraid that, far away from each other, she would change and he would change in opposite directions, so that they would never find one another again. She was afraid that one day they would look at each other and not recognize each other's voices, intentions, looks, or the warmth of their bodies in the bed.

She warned Julian about the danger of secrets, how they were tiny cracks that compromised the tensile strength of a relationship. But that was the other thing about patients who had to keep their home lives hidden, cloaked in shame—secrets felt safe. The truth was much scarier. What a terrible thing to do to a child: weaponize the truth. She sat and made some notes about her conversation with Flora. She’d told Flora to stay in touch. Maybe someday she’d write a book, and though she’d have to get permissions, couch all the identifying patient details, this was an interesting story, a good case. She wondered how it would end.

Wren’s voice dropped. “She feels terrible about it, Cath.” “Good!” Cath shouted. “So do I!” She took a step closer to her sister. “I’m probably going to be crazy for the rest of my life, thanks to her. I’m going to keep making fucked-up decisions and doing weird things that I don’t even realize are weird. People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won’t ever have any normal relationships—and it’s always going to be because I didn’t have a mother. Always. That’s the ultimate kind of broken. The kind of damage you never recover from. I hope she feels terrible. I hope she never forgives herself.” “Don’t say that.” Wren’s face was red, and there were tears in her eyes. “I’m not broken.” There weren’t any tears in Cath’s eyes. “Cracks in your foundation.” She shrugged. “Fuck that.” “Do you think I absorbed all the impact? That when Mom left, it hit my side of the car? Fuck that, Wren. She left you, too.” “But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.” “Do you think Dad let it? Do you think he chose to fall apart when she left?” “Yes!” Wren was shouting now. “And I think he keeps choosing. I think you both do. You’d rather be broken than move on.” “Dad’s sick, Wren,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “And your omelette’s burnt. And I’d rather be broken than wasted.” She set the plate on the counter. “You can tell Laura to go fuck herself. Like, to infinity and beyond. She doesn’t get to move on with me. Ever.

The people around you are mirrors, I think to myself. The dog is paddling in the lake, I watch her lap at the water. You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true and smooth, you see your true self. That's how you learn who you are. And you might be a different person to different people, but it's all feedback that you need, in order to know yourself. But if the mirror is broken or cracked or warped, I continue, taking another drag, then the reflection is not true, and you start to believe that you are this bad reflection. When I look in Courtney's eyes, I see a crazy, overbearing woman, with unbearable good fortune, who is trying to ruin him. I pause. I love him, but he hates me, that is what I see. I will have to tell Courtney to leave. I can't live with him anymore.

It truly is a team sport, and we have the best team in town. But it’s my relationship with Ilana that I cherish most. We have such a strong partnership and have learned how we work most efficiently: I need coffee, she needs tea. When we’re stressed, I pace around and use a weird neck massager I bought online that everyone makes fun of me for, and she knits. When we’re writing together she types, because she’s faster and better at grammar. We actually FaceTime when we’re not in the same city and are constantly texting each other ideas for jokes or observations to potentially use (I recently texted her from Asheville: girl with flip-flops tucked into one strap of tank top). Looking back now at over ten years of doing comedy and running a business with her I can see how our collaboration has expanded and contracted. But it’s the problem-solving aspect of this industry, the producing, the strategy, the realizing that we could put our heads together and figure out the best solution, that has made our relationship and friendship what it is. Because that spills into everything. We both have individual careers now, but those other projects have only been motivating and inspiring to each other and the show. We bring back what we’ve learned on the other sets, in the other negotiations, in the other writers’ rooms or press situations. I’m very lucky to have jumped into this with Ilana Rose Glazer, the ballsy, curly-haired, openhearted, nineteen-year-old girl that cracked me up that night at the corner of the bar at McManus. So many wonderful things have happened since we began working together, but there are a lot of confusing, life-altering things in there too, and it’s such a relief to have someone who completely understands the good and the bad.

Are people really gonna buy it if we never touch each other in public?” Peter asks, looking skeptical. “I don’t think relationships are just about physicality. There are ways to show you care about someone, not just using your lips.” Peter’s smiling, and he looks like he’s about to crack a joke, so I swiftly add, “Or any other body part.” He groans. “You’ve gotta give me something here, Lara Jean. I have a reputation to uphold. None of my friends will believe I suddenly turned into a monk to date you. How about at least a hand in your back jean pocket? Trust me, it’ll be strictly professional.” I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that he cares way too much what people think about him. I just nod and write down, Peter is allowed to put a hand in Lara Jean’s back jean pocket. “But no more kissing,” I say, keeping my head down so he can’t see me blush. “You’re the one who started it,” he reminds me. “And also, I don’t have any STDs, so you can get that out of your head.” “I don’t think you have any STDs.” I look back up at him. “The thing is…I’ve never had a boyfriend before. I’ve never been on a real date before, or held hands walking down the hallway. This is all new for me, so I’m sorry about the forehead thing this morning. I just…wish all of these firsts were happening for real and not with you.” Peter seems to be thinking this over. He says, “Huh. Okay. Let’s just save some stuff, then.” “Yeah?” “Sure. We’ll have some stuff for you to do when it’s the real thing and not for show.” I’m touched. Who knew Peter could be so thoughtful and generous? “Like, I won’t pay for stuff. I’ll save that for a guy who really likes you.” My smile fades. “I wasn’t expecting you to pay for anything!” Peter’s on a roll. “And I won’t walk you to class or buy you flowers.” “I get the picture.” It seems to me like Peter’s less concerned about me and more concerned about his wallet. He sure is cheap.

Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts. Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good." Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government." Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director. The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)

Despite the dangers and discomforts, climbing is for many an all-consuming passion. They interrupt, end, or never start their careers, focusing exclusively on completing the next climb. Climber Todd Skinner said free climbing means "going right to the edge" of your capabilites. For many climbers, this closeness to death - the risk of dying - produces an adrenaline rush that most other life experiences simply can't. It is what keeps many of them married to the sport. Probably no other sport creates such a feeling of oneness with Mother Nature. Attached to a mountainside by fingertips and toes, the climber necessarily becomes part of the rock - or else. One climber says that while scaling a granite face, she felt close to God, so intense was her relationship with the natural world. Climbers speak of "floating" or "performing a ballet" over the rock, each placement of foot and each reach into a crack creating unity with the mountain. The sport is one of total engagement with the here-and-now, which frees the mind from everything else. Climbers' concentration is complete and focused. Their only thought is executing the next move... Ken Bokelund... said: "Climbing for me has always been the strength of the body over the weakness of the mind. If you train so that you are very strong physically and you have mastered the techniques, then all that's left is believing. Freeing your mind of fear is the key. This is very difficult to do, but when you can achieve it, then you are in true harmony with the rock. Fear is just one more thing to worry about and is very distracting. It can make you fall... ...when you know you are strong enough to complete any maneuver, once that level of physical confidence is achieved, then you are able to put fear out of your mind. Climbing becomes a very simple pleasure. It's just you and the rock. It's a total clarity of being, a time when nothing matters, you're moving without any thought, you're in a place where time stands still. Even when you're on a wall for days, when you get down, everything seems exactly the same, as though time never passed.

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the differences in feeling that might underlie similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed commonplace affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars. But with the critical superiority possessed by anyone who remains aloof, whatever the relationship, Rodolphe perceived in this love further pleasures to be exploited. He deemed all modesty inconvenient. He treated her casually. He made her into something pliant and corrupt. Hers was a sort of idiot attachment filled with admiration for him, sensual delights for her, a bliss that numbed her; and her soul was sinking into this intoxication and drowning in it, shriveled like the Duke of Clarence in his butt of malmsey.

Since we’re on the topic, I’d also like to set some ground rules.” “What kind of ground rules?” he asks, leaning back. I press my lips together and take a breath. “Well…I don’t want you trying to kiss me again.” Peter curls his lip at me. “Trust me, I don’t want to do it either. My forehead still hurts from this morning. I think I have a bruise.” He pushes his hair off his forehead. “Do you see a bruise?” “No, but I see a receding hairline.” “What?” Ha. I knew that would get him. Peter’s so vain. “Calm down, I’m only kidding. Do you have a piece of paper and a pen?” “You’re gonna write this down?” Primly I say, “It’ll help us remember.” Rolling his eyes, Peter reaches into his backpack, pulls out a notebook, and hands it to me. I turn to a clean page and write at the top, Contract. Then I write No kissing. “Are people really gonna buy it if we never touch each other in public?” Peter asks, looking skeptical. “I don’t think relationships are just about physicality. There are ways to show you care about someone, not just using your lips.” Peter’s smiling, and he looks like he’s about to crack a joke, so I swiftly add, “Or any other body part.” He groans. “You’ve gotta give me something here, Lara Jean. I have a reputation to uphold. None of my friends will believe I suddenly turned into a monk to date you. How about at least a hand in your back jean pocket? Trust me, it’ll be strictly professional.” I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that he cares way too much what people think about him. I just nod and write down, Peter is allowed to put a hand in Lara Jean’s back jean pocket. “But no more kissing,” I say, keeping my head down so he can’t see me blush. “You’re the one who started it,” he reminds me.

But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people's infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don't sense the danger as it's happening, because what's wrong with friendship? Why can't we have friends of the opposite sex--or of the same sex, for that matter--even if we are married? The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony--so long as the "walls and windows" of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass's theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world--that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage. What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself--your deepest yearnings and frustrations--and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.

unless we’re missing our guess, your life and the gospel probably haven’t always felt in sync on a lot of days, in most of the years since. After the emotional scene with the trembling chin and the wadded-up Kleenexes, where you truly felt the weight of your own sin and the Spirit’s conviction, you’ve had a hard time consistently enjoying and experiencing what God’s supposedly done to remedy this self-defeating situation. Even on those repeat occasions when you’ve crashed and burned and resolved to do better, you’ve typically only been able, for a little while, to sit on your hands, trying to stay in control of yourself by rugged determination and brute sacrifice (which you sure hope God is noticing and adding to your score). But you’ll admit, it’s not exactly a feeling of freedom and victory. And anytime the wheels come off again, as they often do, it just feels like the same old condemnation as before. Devastating that you can’t crack the code on this thing, huh? You were pretty sure that being a Christian was supposed to change you—and it has. Some. But man, there’s still so much more that needs changing. Drastic things. Daily things. Changes in your habits, your routines, in your choices and decisions, changes to the stuff you just never stop hating about yourself, changes in what you do and don’t do . . . and don’t ever want to do again! Changes in how you think, how you cope, how you ride out the guilt and shame when you’ve blown it again. How you shoot down those old trigger responses—the ones you can’t seem to keep from reacting badly to, even after you keep telling yourself to be extra careful, knowing how predictably they set you off. Changes in your closest relationships, changes in your work habits, changes that have just never happened for you before, the kind of changes that—if you can ever get it together—might finally start piling up, you think, rolling forward, fueling some fresh momentum for you, keeping you moving in the right direction. But then—stop us if you’ve heard this one before . . . You barely if ever change. And come on, shouldn’t you be more transformed by now? This is around the point where, when what you’ve always thought or expected of God is no longer squaring with what you’re feeling, that you start creating your own cover versions of the gospel, piecing together things you’ve heard and believed and experimented with—some from the past, some from the present. You lay down new tracks with a gospel feel but, sadly, not always a lot of gospel truth.

If YOUR free READ it calmly. This to all my FOLKS and MYSELF our expectations, our needs, our dreams, our destiny, our life style, Our likes and dislikes. we always RUN around so many things without even THINKING. Have a look on our SATISFACTION list # new gadget or a mobile for example fun for 2 months? # New bike fun for "2 months" . # New car for "3"? # Getting into a relationship wantedly as we are alone max 3/4 months? # Revenge ? A weak? Month? # flirting ? 2/3 months # sex ? Few mins # boozing, joint or a fag? Few hours? # addicting to something leaving behind everything? One year? # your example of anything repeatedly done for satisfaction? Max? Get a number yourself! ¦¦¦ Even though we satisfy our soul by all the above. Passing day by day. Years passed. Yet left with the same IRRITATING feeling to satisfy our needs. ONE after ANOTHER . ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ Some day we realize it was " pure SELFISH satisfaction " and left with a "GUILT " and EMPTINESS . questioning LIFE ! ¦¦¦ "In the RAMPAGE of getting everything we wished. We might not realize what we MISSED . Being CARELESS of our surrounding." "Feelings left hurt and hearts broken. Family friends and people we cares and who cares us. PRIORITIES made by ourself to be satisfied even here." If LIFE was just to satisfy what ever we WISHED for. Was it A life worth lived? May be! Yes. But it's SURE you end up questioning life with BLACKNESS ! # So many questions unanswered. Our EXISTENCE ? Our DESTINY ? To question the existence of God and HEAVEN .? At Last questioning the existence of UNIVERSE itself? The whole system CRACKS a nerve! Why spoil our LIFE when we are the creators of our LIFE ! When we are capable of finding an answer to does questions by our self Finding that true meaning of LIFE beyond all the mess we live by daily. which is Going to satisfy us. We need to realize by now our Every action should lead to Happiness and satisfaction of the people around us. It's the real paradise feeling we all wish for. The real deal. We disrupt our LIFE in the rampage of getting everything we need which can automatically be provided by LIFE . When we start sacrificing our LIFE in a positive way being busy fulfilling the needs of our dears ones. They indeed be busy trying to fulfill our needs and wishes. It's giving some things and getting something back. With less expectations. Rather than grabbing. A SECRET for a PERFECT LIFE which we FAIL to live by. Starting from FORGIVING everyone who tumbles in our path trying to steal away our positive life and happiness. Because as we all are tamed to do MISTAKE at some point. There is not much TIME left to waste by hating and cursing LIFE when we can start LIVING right now. "A REMINDER just to make sure we try to be SELFLESS and find that UNMATCHED HAPPINESS and SATISFACTION ." ~~¦¦ LIFE is complex to understand yet so SIMPLE ¦¦ ¶¶ Never be in a hurry on GETTING on to something you might be left with NOTHING ¶¶ << Being SELFISH makes us a HEALTHY human but being SELFLESS makes you A HUMAN >> «« LIFE is meaningful when we forget about our THIRST and QUENCH the thirst of OTHERS .»» RETHINK AND REDEFINE LIFE ¶¶ ~ Sharath kumar G .

We need sensual activation as a matter of urgency, because it holds the wisdom and vision of love that these old beliefs are failing to crack.

As sscary as this is for you," Mom says evenly, "there's only one wrong move here." I tongue my cracked tooth. "What's that?" "Doing nothing.

After spending five decades of being beaten down, mistreated, and stabbed in the back, little Dana grew up. Little Dana fearlessly faced her trauma wounds. Little Dana cracked open that terrifying door to process and to address everything. And when I write everything, I mean ‘every rotten thing said and done to harm me.’ Everything from my early childhood sexual abuse, child neglect, psychological abuse, physical abuse, unfit parenting by my narcissistic mother, to my sister’s spouse who sexually assaulted me, to every imaginable covert scheme by my six toxic siblings (AKA Flying Monkeys) who sadistically enjoyed hurting me. They each took great pleasure in trying to destroy me, my life, my health, my relationships, my career, and my reputation.

This journey is the tempest before the flourishing, where we are stripped of everything we hold dear, left naked, and on our knees. It is the necessary death of our false selves so that we may be born into our true selves—healed and whole. When it comes without our choosing, this initiation shows up as the abrupt desecration of something foundational: The loss of a job we loathed but relied upon. The end of a toxic relationship. The death of a loved one. The diagnosis of an illness. An accident. An assault. It is the sudden cracking open of the ground beneath your feet, which forces you to face what lurks beneath. It is a holy invitation to honor your wounds and grieve them fully so that you may invite the grace of healing. It is a benevolently ruthless call to face all the ways in which you have betrayed yourself so that you may find your way back to who you truly are, what you really want, and what you will no longer stand for.'' -Syma Kharal

A covert narcissist can appear to be a loving partner for a long time. Their behavior often becomes more aggressive at the end of the relationship. This is when the narcissistic traits listed in the DSM-IV become more obvious; the sense of entitlement and superiority, the arrogant attitude, becomes more pronounced. They will still be covert with others, but the survivor will see and experience more of the overt traits coming to the surface. Their mask cracks when you, the survivor, begin trusting yourself. The stronger you become, the less they can control and manipulate you. When this happens, they no longer need you. You are no longer supplying them. This is when you feel their rage more than ever. This is when their behavior turns aggressive, cruel, and shocking.

I have seen people with smiling faces and feeling lonely desolate inside their hearts. I have seen people with public success and private failures in their life. I have seen most of us chasing small highs in their life rather than trying to achieve something concrete. I have seen big giants losing basic moral values for small profits in their materialistic pursuit. I have seen people dancing whole day to the tunes of life and crying alone at midnight. I have seen best of relationships breaking off with the test of time. I have seen young teenagers with broken hearts and old ones with cracked minds. And you know what this is not the end of the list. To put it simple, I just wish to say that, life is short. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself trying to overdo everything. Don’t hanker after all the things you see others doing or achieving. Have some good moral values in your life. Be with friends who possess golden hearts rather than gold in their pockets or lockers. Keep few but good relationships. Have absolute faith in God and yourself. And try to be simple yet Happy. In the end what matters is not the number of cars you drive or money you possess in your bank account but what matters most is how well you sail through the winds of life against all the storms and hurricanes past over you. Think what makes you – YOU.

God forbid he fall through the cracks because he was unemployed, underemployed, wasn’t tall enough, romantic enough or seemed a bit weird in the beginning. She even had a couple of long-distance relationships because love knew no bounds, and if she never tried, she would never know.

The chill in her heart seemed to mock her as it echoed “critters,” “debris,” and “tempestuous.” The iciness inside of her only hardened as she contemplated how she had so callously left her husband behind at the gas station. Surely no woman in her right mind would do what she had done. As she examined these thoughts, she tried to make order of them and what caused the break--for something had definitely been broken. Cracked. Fractured. And now those frozen fractals were piercing her heart and mind. She would add “soul” but at this point, she wondered what had become of hers.

He looked too tired to stand. I could almost feel the quarry pulling him in. “You're still alive!” I screamed. “You have to try harder because we love you!” Daddy fought a sob, reached for me. It looked like he had just limped off the plane, the band playing, thousands of hands clapping, mouths cheering, waves of tears raining down to wash away the years of heartache. I stepped toward him, ready to fly up into his arms so I could hug his neck and tell him that I missed him so much. The snow underneath me cracked, crumbled, and then everything disappeared.

So there you are, shell cracked, with waves of pain washing over you. What do you do? Get as comfortable as you can and see how you can learn to ride those waves instead of drowning under them.

People who crack the perfect jokes at the perfect time are just much sought after at all social gatherings.

My sister thinks there’s something wrong with me, she thinks my head is cracked and I’ve turned Penelope into a goddess no other woman can compete with. It’s not true. Death is a fucking bitch. The pain was excruciating. How was it fair to drag another person down with me? You understand that a relationship must begin with happiness, not someone else’s sadness and madness.

You know, not to be crass, but there’s no need to crack open a safe when you already know the combination. Zoe can’t have given it much credence anyway, because our relationship didn’t change a jot, even though I’m sure some people around her would have quite liked it to. She found the note on Halloween and we spent that night together, we even went out dressed up. I was the psycho killer from Scream

I compare building a relationship to building a house. While everyone’s all excited to paint and decorate a finished house, no one actually wants to go and build the foundation and the basement. As in building a house, the basement represents the foundation of a relationship, the part that is responsible for holding up that house that we love so much. If the foundation of a home is shoddy, cracked, or not aligned, then the house will fall—and the same is true for any relationship.

I’m just a barbarian half-orc in a deeply committed relationship with my mead, but Lawton might be slipping into the space I reserve right next to my mead for people just as important. I’m not saying I’d leave my mead for him, but I am saying I would save him if it was a choice between him and my mead. I can’t say that’s true for all people, and I know that makes me a bad person, but what part of “barbarian” doesn’t already imply that I would kill for a barrel of mead, and that’s not an exaggeration? Well, now I would kill for the little prince too, and that’s also not an exaggeration.

Bonds root you to your existence,and when they get cracked you are loosing your means to survive,hold them tight.Now make sure the bonds are based on trust and love and worth trying for!

I love finding your light within the delicate cracks of my soul. There is solace in knowing that every bridge within my brokenness is being restored by your unconditional heart.

All in all, time spent on improving relationships—with parents, with students and student-to-student—improves learning in the long run. Those solid relationships build the foundation that your educational house rests on—and wards off the cracks that cause things to crumble.

I used to get mad at guys who’d made the mistakes my friend has made. Their lives seemed so dark and even evil that I wanted to distance myself from them. I felt that way about those guys until an acquaintance made a similar mistake and was shunned, and right about the time we all forgot about him the news broke about his suicide. Who was I to judge? When my friend Bob called to encourage me because of the relational mistakes I’d made, he didn’t call to condemn. There was plenty of that in my life. But Bob called to be a crack of light in a dark room, something to crawl toward. So I told my friend something like Bob told me. “I’m not sure of what all you’ve done,” I said to my friend. “And I know some people hate you. But I think you’re pretty good at relationships.” My friend looked at me confused. He laughed a little, then sighed, then teared up. “It’s true you’re bad at relationships,” I said, “but it’s also true you are good at them. They’re both true, old friend.” I reminded him of all the people who love him and all the people he’s loved. I told him I thought it was unfair for a man to be judged by a moment, by a season. We are all more complicated than that.

We’ve got things under control here.” “‘We’?” Kerry repeated. “Shouldn’t you be out sampling cake or agonizing over invitation fonts? Assuming you don’t have clients to design interiors for.” “I have clients,” Fiona replied easily, honest joy beaming from her every pore. “Very happy ones. Trust me, after running McCrae Interiors, I can juggle Fiona’s Finds and planning a wedding at the same time with my eyes closed.” Kerry gave her sister a hard time--it was what they did--but she was truly happy for Fiona, with both her new business success and her lovely and loving relationship with their longtime family friend, Ben Campbell. Fiona had sold a successful business in Manhattan to return home and start over. She’d just opened a small design studio in a converted cottage near the harbor, focusing on recycling and repurposing antique and vintage items into something fresh and new. Her designs were both eco-friendly and wallet friendly, and the Cove had embraced her return home and her new business with equal enthusiasm. “Remember you said that,” Kerry commented. “When it’s go time on the big aisle walk and you’re still running around like a crazy person trying to pull everything together at the last second, I don’t want to hear about it.” Fiona batted her eyelashes again as she took an extralong sip on the straw in her glass of lemon water. “I’m the epitome of a happy, relaxed bride. McCrae girls don’t do bridezilla. Well, Hannah didn’t, Alex was lovely, and I’m charming of course.” She looked at Kerry over the tip of her straw, smiling sweetly. “We’ll reserve final judgment until it’s your turn.” “Har, har,” Kerry said, but Fiona was high on wedding crack again so she let her run with it. “Besides, after handling weddings for Logan, Hannah, and the Grace-Delia double do out on that island, this will be a cakewalk. Ha!” Fiona went on, then laughed. “Cakewalk.” “You’re a designer? And you do weddings?” Maddy turned on her stool and spun Fiona on hers until they were facing each other. She gripped Fiona’s forearms and grinned. “Hello, my new best and dearest friend.” “Oh, brother.” Kerry surrendered, tossing her towel on the bar.

Are people really gonna buy it if we never touch each other in public?” Peter asks, looking skeptical. “I don’t think relationships are just about physicality. There are ways to show you care about someone, not just using your lips.” Peter’s smiling, and he looks like he’s about to crack a joke, so I swiftly add, “Or any other body part.” He groans. “You’ve gotta give me something here, Lara Jean.

You only taste the blood of your soul by cracking open and reaching into the abyss.

PART1: To say Sean felt stressed was a huge understatement. Give him a cliff to scale or a bar brawl to break up. Hell, give him a freight train to try to outrun, anything but having to pull off being the best man for his brother Finn’s wedding—including but not limited to keeping said brother from losing his collective shit. It’s not like Sean didn’t understand. Getting married was a big deal. Okay, so he didn’t fully understand, not really, but he wanted to. He really did. And how funny was that? Sean O’Riley, younger brother, hook-up king extraordinaire, was suddenly tired of the game and found himself aching for his own forever after. “We almost there?” Finn asked him from the backseat of the vehicle Sean was driving. “Yep.” “And you double checked on our reservations?” “Yep.” “No, I’m serious, man,” Finn said. “Remember when you took me to Vegas and when we got there, every hotel was booked and we had to stay at the Magic-O motel?” “Man, a guy screws up one time . . .” “We had a stripper pole in our rooms, Sean.” Sean sighed. “Okay, but to be fair, that was back when I was still in my stupid phase. I promise you that we have reservations—no stripper poles. I even double and triple checked, just like you asked me a hundred and one times. Pru, I hope you realize you’re marrying a nag.” Pru, Finn’s fiancée, laughed from the shotgun position. “Hey, one of us has to be the nag in this relationship, and it isn’t me.” Sean held up a palm and Pru leaned over the console to give him a high-five. “Just so you know,” Sean said to Finn, “I didn’t pick this place, your woman did.” “True story,” Pru said. “The B&B’s closed to the public this entire weekend. Sean booked the whole place for our bachelor/bachelorette party weekend extravaganza.” “I superheroed this thing,” Sean said. Finn snorted and let loose of a small smile because they both knew that for most of Sean’s childhood, that’s what he’d aspired to be, a superhero—sans tights though. Tights had never been Sean’s thing, especially after suffering through them for two seasons in high school football before he’d mercifully cracked his clavicle.

When trust is broken, foundational cracks occur which weaken the entire relationship. As with concrete, no amount of filling and patching you apply with the hope of fortifying the fracture will ever repair the weakness caused by the rift.

The Chick Being Born Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment—growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking—the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world. The lesson is profound. Transformation always involves the falling away of things we have relied on, and we are left with a feeling that the world as we know it is coming to an end, because it is. Yet the chick offers us the wisdom that the way to be born while still alive is to eat our own shell. When faced with great change—in self, in relationship, in our sense of calling—we somehow must take in all that has enclosed us, nurtured us, incubated us, so when the new life is upon us, the old is within us. The next chance you get, watch something being born. If moved by this notion, actively pursue this. Go to a zoo. Or a farm. Or a nursery. Or an aquarium. Or walk the floor of newborns at your local hospital. As you witness birth of some kind, note what detail touches you. Take it as a teacher and see if it describes something struggling to be born in you.

If you have any compassion, then do not rebuke anyone in trying to improve them. He will surely meet someone who will crack his head to improve him.

Instantly, I noticed that our conversation was easy, flirtatious and exciting. It didn’t take very long for us to get to know each other. To start with, I was a little taken aback with both of them being so friendly and talkative. As we talked, I really didn’t know what to call Rita and I stammered some as I attempted to navigate around the social aspects of my dilemma. I didn’t know her last name and “Mrs. Whatjamacallit” didn’t seem appropriate, so I continued using her first name. What seemed awkward to me at first, soon became and sounded acceptable. I also noticed that Connie alternated between calling her mother “Mom” and “Rita.” At first this was strange, but soon I kind of understood the unique relationship between them. For me it seemed different, however I tend to adapt easily and now I was becoming acquainted with a girl who called her mother by her first name. The house was without central heating, but it did have a big cast iron Franklin stove in the living room. Rita looked over to me and asked if I would light the fire. “Guess so,” I replied. I soon found out that lighting the fire encompassed getting and splitting the firewood, and then tending to it. Connie showed me to the front porch where there was a big pile of cordwood, just dumped in one heap. I also noticed that the wind was picking up and was blowing the white stuff onto the porch and covering the woodpile. “Might be a good idea to bring in enough wood to last the night,” I thought aloud. This was going to become a full time job! With Connie’s able help I got a roaring fire going. Rita made sandwiches and poured us all some Coca-Cola, which she topped off with some Canadian Whiskey. Turning the damper down on the fire, I thought to myself that the Franklin stove would never heat this size house, besides the wind was coming in through the cracks around the windows and doors. I knew that the house didn’t have much insulation by how cold the walls were. The windows were single pane, which also didn’t help much, but at least it was shelter. When I mentioned this, Rita said, “Never mind, we’ll all be able to stay warm in bed.” By this time, Connie and I were clowning around and Rita reminded us that she was also there. “I may be momma but I’m not about to freeze, while you kids have all the fun! Besides we only have one bed.” Suddenly the whole scene came into focus. The sandwiches on the kitchen table wouldn’t be our only food. The sandwiches we would have that night would just be the beginning of a feast.

She used to hate conflict and had associated this feeling with a churning stomach and the notion that things were in discord, breaking down, hopeless. You could patch things up later, glue the relationship back together, but the cracks remained. Sooner or later it broke for good. Now, though, it was a good feeling. It meant she'd acted. Headed off a threat. Conflict wasn't necessarily a portent of decay. Instead, it was a weapon to keep that decay away from you—if you had the balls to use

I fully realize that all men and women who are in love lie to themselves to one degree or another. Love, I’ve found, whitewashes its object. Any blemishes, crevices, or cracks are filled with pure and bright illusion, the root of which is vanity. Only over time does this brightness wear off.

have control over something, it is fundamental that we understand the cause-and-effect relationship between the action we take and the outcome we expect.

At the same time as suggesting the language game we clearly do not have a change in the name of God as our only way to think in New Testament terms of an earth at peace. There is Jesus! It is very hard to attribute violence to the originator of the gospel, of the good news of God’s forgiveness and love, of divine healing and welcome. Despite the fact that people refer to his action in the temple in the last days of his life as an exceptional yet conclusive ‘proof’ of Jesus’ use of violence no serious bible scholar would look on these actions divorced from his whole ministry. And because of that we have to see them as a conscious and deliberate prophetic sign-action, taking control of the temple for a brief period to show how it stood in contrast to the direct relationship with God which he proclaimed, and to make the point with a definitive emphasis. The whip he plaits in John is used to drive the animals, probably with the sound of the crack alone. No one is attacked. No one gets hurt. And very soon the situation reverts to the status quo: the authorities take back control of the temple and decide on Jesus’ suffering and death in order to control him. Overall the event is to be seen as Jesus placing himself purposely and calculatedly in the cross-hairs for the sake of the truth, much rather than doing harm to anyone else. The consequences of his actions were indeed ‘the cross’, and supremely in the situation of crucifixion Jesus does not invoke retaliation on his enemies, or threaten those who reject redemption; rather he prays for their forgiveness. No, Jesus’ whole life-story makes him unmistakably a figure of transcendent nonviolence. The problem lies elsewhere, with the way the cross is interpreted within the framework of a violent God. It is unfathomably ironic that the icon of human non-retaliation, Jesus’ cross, gets turned in the tradition into a supreme piece of vengeance—God’s ‘just’ punishment of Jesus in our place. My book, Cross Purposes, is about the way this tradition got formed and it represents just one of a constant stream of writing, gathering force at the end of the last century and continuing into this, questioning how this could be the meaning of the central symbol of Christianity.2 I think the vigor of that question can only continue to grow, while the nonviolence of Jesus’ response must at the same time stand out in greater and greater relief, in its own right and for its own sake. And for that same reason the argument at hand, of ‘No-name’ for a nonviolent God, can only be strengthened when we highlight the nonviolence of Jesus against the traditional violent concept of ‘God’. Now

I had just gotten home from having lunch with Lisa and she’d mentioned sending you a care package. Your name just popped into my head when Gram asked what my boyfriend’s name was.” He shook his head. “Let me get this straight. You told your grandmother that a guy you’ve never met is your boyfriend?” “I just wanted her to worry less.” “Maybe she’s right to worry about you.” Ouch. “I’m not crazy, you know.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked down at her. “You made up an imaginary boyfriend.” “You’re not imaginary. Just uninformed.” He didn’t even crack a smile. “What do you want from me?” And here came the crazy part—the more crazy part, anyway. “Gram’s coming home. She wants to check on the house and...she wants to meet you.” As she spoke, Emma made sure none of her body parts were breaking the plane of the doorway, just in case he slammed the door in her face. It was something she might do, if some strange guy showed up on her doorstep and told her they were in a deep, meaningful relationship. “So…what? You want me to have dinner with you guys? Pretend I’m your fiancé for a few hours?” “She’ll be here for a month.” He laughed at her then. A deep, infectious laugh that made her want to join in even though he was laughing at her.

Keep the Love alive. The Bible says that, “Love covers over a multitude of sins.” I love that picture of love being strong enough to cover our imperfections and fill in the cracks of our broken hearts. Keep loving each other and allow God to use the power of love and grace to bring wholeness and healing to your relationship.

foolishly perhaps, expected something different from their three-year relationship. He’d been after crazy spontaneity and over-sexualized Carnivale stereotypes from his

I think that every time you hurt somebody you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening—and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything.

How long are you two going to play this game, Beck? You don’t think I know how you spend your nights, sitting at home like a fucking old man? You don’t date; you work, which I’m sure everyone loves since you do all the hard shit before we ever even crack the file open to start a new case. But you aren’t doing yourself any favors. If Dee doesn’t want a relationship, or whatever the hell you’re fighting this one man war for, I think it’s time to move on.” He walks over, puts his beer back in the fridge, and takes a deep breath before continuing. The whole time, I’m statue still. “Whatever her issues are . . . they aren’t yours to worry about.

One of the strategic ways Satan initiates a separation is by luring us into a place of complaining. If he can get us to focus on what is aggravating and negative in life, little cracks of distance start forming in our relationships. The grass starts looking greener everywhere except where we are standing.

I see the pain of miserly love in young people,' I say. 'You don't have that kind of melancholy on your face. But I'm careful not to step on your feet when I speak with you. It's not like dancing. It's like a stone walkway with a little grass between the cracks. It's strong but I will try to tread carefully and not ruin it. In Muslim homes you leave your shoes outside. This is how I behave with you.

Since sin is the multifaced distortion of humans in their relations with God, self, others, and the world, and since cracked Eikons create systemic injustice, inherent to the atoning work of God os restorative justice. God’s redemptive intent is to restore and rehabilitate humans in their relationship with God, self, others, and the world, and when that happens justice is present and established. The followers of Jesus both proclaim and embody atoning justice by fighting injustice and establishing just that kind of justice. Their forward guard is surrounded with the banner of grace and forgiveness.

An artwork could always be restored and sold with no depreciated value―the cracks and tears provide more character, But when it comes to human emotions, how far could you stretch your heart to let go of the pain?

When I tell my doctor aunt about my endometriosis diagnosis (“endo” for those in the know), she says I better get cracking. “In medical school, that was the first thing we were taught,” she says. “After an endo diagnosis you say get started now.” My doctor never said that to me. He was casual—now that I consider it, too casual? I had been right all along, known better than any doctor: something really was wrong down there. So I have to get started now. It’s time to get started now. And why not? I wonder. I have a job. I am in love. We have an extra bedroom that we are currently using for shoes, boxes, and occasional guests. I am told my dog is unusually good with children. I already look fucking pregnant. Why the hell not? I can feel them. The babies. They’re not crawling all over me. They’re not vomiting in my hair or shrieking. They’re doing perfectly normal baby things, and I’m keeping them alive. But I resent them. Their constancy, their intrusion on my relationship and my free time and my naps and my imagination and my heart. They’ve come too soon, and I can’t do any of what I had planned. All I can do is survive. My

A small crack in a wall, the wall might fall. A small crack in a relationship, several walls get created.

An Account Management process is used to maximize the long-term value of selected customers. It helps you to align your company’s goals with those of your customer and to find compelling ways to strengthen your business relationship.

This is a relationship in which each partner has the capacity to abuse the other: books can crack our spines, loosen our leaves, mark us with their dirty fingers and write in our margins just as much as we can theirs.

Qui-Gon waited at the landing platform with Obi-Wan. He remembered arriving on this planet while worrying about what was to come with his apprentice. It was true that he missed that pure trust, that lack of shadows between them. He had seen the flaws in Obi-Wan, and the flaws in himself. He had seen where their flaws could rub up against each other and create fissures in their relations, cracking them open like a groundquake could split the very core of a planet. Yet there was something to be gained from that, Qui-Gon thought. Now their relationship could truly begin, for they had seen the worst of it and they had both decided that what they wanted, the most important thing, was to go on.

When you let love visit you a few times and leave without a goodbye, breaks all the dishes, smashes the doors and windows leaving you to walk on the glass with your bare feet cracked open and bleeding trudging through those floors, your tear stains mix with blood and sweat and pain. when you do that and love leaves your home in this state every single time, who are you to blame? You for believing in love or love for leaving you this way?

My wife was a difficult person, but I wasn’t so different. I used to think that we complemented each other—like the saying goes: Even a cracked pot has a lid that fits.

But I think that every time you hurt somebody you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening—and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything

In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction. In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die.

You were really upset the other night. I know you were trying to put on a brave face, but it was obvious Darcy hurt you. Worse than you let on. Now “You were really upset the other night. I know you were trying to put on a brave face, but it was obvious Darcy hurt you. Worse than you let on. Now you’re agreeing to fake a relationship with her? Because of your family? Elle, if they can’t see how amazing you are . . . this isn’t worth it.” Elle ground the toe of her boot into the rug, tracing the singe mark in the paisley pattern from the Birthday Sparkler Incident of 2017. “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she admitted. The lump inside her throat grew, forcing her to swallow to keep her voice from cracking. “I’m just tired of falling short, Mar.” Margot’s face crumpled. “Elle—” She jerked her chin and sniffed hard, blinking away the film of tears blurring her vision. She smiled and shrugged. “If I can get my family to take me seriously about one thing, see that I have my life together in a way that makes sense to them, maybe they’ll come around to the rest.” Margot shook her head. “So you’re throwing in the towel? You’re going to be like Lydia now? Dating the sorts of people your parents want and shrinking yourself down to be palatable to people who don’t get you? Who don’t even try?” No. God no. Elle wasn’t going to actually compromise who she was or how she lived her life. No, this was a blip on Elle’s radar, a pit stop, a means to an end. Elle wasn’t settling. She just wanted her parents to be proud of her for who she was. If she had to speak their language for a brief bit of time, what was the harm? “No way. This is fake. I just want them to understand I’m not the letdown they think I am. Maybe hearing how awesome I am from someone else, someone like Darcy who’s the sort of person who satisfies their whole nine-to-five I’m a serious adult vibe, will help.” Margot stuck out her tongue, eyes rolling. “Boring, you mean?” Elle shrugged. “Besides, it’s cuffing season and Lydia’s got a boyfriend. Jane’s got Gabe and Daniel has Mike and I’m just—Elle. I’m not exactly jazzed about spending another holiday alone as the black sheep of the family.” “Just Elle is pretty great.” Margot smiled. “But I get it. I mean, I might not be in your shoes, but I understand where you’re coming from. I just want you to remember that you deserve someone you don’t have to fake it with.” Both her brows rose. “And I mean that in all ways.” Elle cracked a smile. “Thanks.

ANT / ANT Type:[2] Question 1. Is it true? Sometimes this first question will stop the ANT because you already know the thought is not true. Sometimes your answer will be “I don’t know.” Question 2. Is it absolutely true? Do you know it with 100 percent certainty? This often cracks the thought. Question 3. How do I feel when I believe this thought? How do I act with this thought? What is the outcome of having this thought? Question 4. How would I feel and act, and what would be the outcome, if I couldn’t have this thought? Question 5. Turn the thought around to its opposite. Then ask if the opposite of the thought is true or even truer than the original thought. Here’s

Now, take our existing structure and add some 40 years to the average life span. What happens? You have perhaps five generations instead of three as the typical unit: children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and nonbiological family. Add in the fact that people will still have life bumps and changes, divorce will still happen, and blended families will grow. Families will become tribes rather than small units. Most of all, enhanced longevity underscores the importance of strong relationships—romantic, familial, and platonic—as they are a major source of optimum health. Keeping connected as we age is critical, especially for the very old (relationships keep us in the present, not the past).

The key to loving relationships, research has found, is what’s called “emotional responsiveness.” This is just what it sounds like: being there for the people around you, not physically, but in an emotionally engaged way. This applies not just to romantic relationships, but to friendships as well.

Your only real control is to withhold your expertise. And although withholding expertise is the only leverage real experts have, it can be a powerful one, indeed. Let me show you how this relates to the second basic component of positioning: Good positioning makes you noninterchangeable. Imagine a somewhat difficult conversation with one of your existing clients. You’re uncomfortable with the direction they want to pursue, particularly since you know they’ll be holding you partly responsible for the results. You make your case carefully but passionately. You feel strongly that this is a mistake, for all sorts of reasons. The client presses and presses, but you don’t relent. There’s an honest disagreement. It’s not that you don’t know where the other party stands. No, you are both clear about that and just disagree. Eventually, the client says — after three years of working together, no less — that they are noticing an increasingly different perspective on how to impact the future and maybe it’s time for a fresh approach. Essentially they want to sever the relationship and move on. This usually doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s likely to have built up over time until the client gets to this place where they seem to be looking for opportunities to disagree with you. Nevertheless, the expert (you) has reached a turning point with the other controlling party (the client). As this crack in the surface widens, and it looks less reparable than earlier disagreements, the client entertains the possibility of replacing your expertise. They’ve surveyed the landscape of firms like yours and they aren’t that worried about finding an expert who will be a little more cooperative and helpful (as they read the disagreement). So what has seemed increasingly likely does, in fact, occur, and the client severs the relationship with your firm. That point is when the stopwatch starts. Tick, tick, tick. It keeps running until that same client finds a suitable (or even better) substitute for your expertise. But here’s the thing: The client is the one who defines success in that venture. When you hear about who they found to replace your firm, you may scoff and mutter about how inadequate the substitute expert is, but you don’t get to do that. “They hired who? [Snicker.] I saw their work for XYZ and was not impressed. The client will quickly find out that we weren’t so bad after all and that what we’ve been saying makes sense. There will be an initial honeymoon and then it’ll be just like it was with us.” It doesn’t matter.

I was walking all along just going for a walk outside after the party, I just felt good, I didn’t know if I wanted to sing, dance, and or cry; I was that happy getting to be with Marcel, so I went to my spot in the old car in the junkyard. I have to jump the face and rip my tank top or something like that yet it worth it, to see my dream car, sitting there I not a girlie girl but I love this cute thing it's sex looking like me. I found this old car at colleen’s junkyard it like right next door, I freak’n loved this old piece of crap, I even had sex with myself in the back seat, I took the old hood ornament off myself and keep it, my dad said it was off of Neveah’s dad's car, yet it was given to my mom and that why it just sitting outside for all the kids like me to rip the parts off of and sell on eBay. My stepmom hated Kristen, my real mother, so that is why the car ended up where it’s at, it was passed down yet the step-monster made sure I would never have it. My stepdad said the emblem is of a 1950 Nash that I found, little did I know it doesn’t go on that car yet, I think it’s a good fit, I was getting the car on my eighteenth birthday- I freaked up and had to die, just like me in the graveyard we both are retreating away. My stepdads had the 1950 Nash which he said was the first real sports car and it’s all steel, so I put it back on without him knowing that I did, funny maybe that's why I passed doing something like that… it was like it was meant for that car, or so he said and I did also. There is an old fender off what likes to be some old ford over there too that is rusty red, I am not sure of the year it’s too damn old for me to know. I remember right my dad said that grand-ma Nevaeh went to school in something like a 1965 Cadillac Deville convertible, yet, I don’t see that she had like nothing, I don’t know what that thing is. Like with these old cars, don't think you have a seat belt, you just cracked your head off the dash of the Nash and then they wiped it off, and sold it to some other poor ass hole.

The One Who Moves Me by Stewart Stafford Her caress and laughter, Cast out the darkness, And lull the choppy waters, Her embrace, a flowering meadow. Her absence stills the earth, Cracked ice on a frozen lake, Asphyxiating silence descends, The Faustian poker of loneliness. Lexicons filled with her silences, Seismic shifts of stinging rage, She, in naked imperfection as I, Together, reuniting in shelter. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Most couples wait too long to go (to marriage counseling). There's an average six-year delay between the first cracks in a marriage and actually getting help... When entropy decays the happiness of a marriage over time, it's not just a linear downward progression for everyone. Often, there's a phase change (like water to ice)... In marriage this goes by the appropriately intimidating term negative sentiment override. Idealization hasn't faded-- it has flipped. If love is positive delusion, NSO is utter disillusionment. You are biased against, not toward, your partner. The facts haven't necessarily changed, just your interpretation of them. Rather than attributing problems to context, attributions now lie in someone's poor character traits.

But the quest to preserve your brain is not just about avoiding something that’s scary. It’s also about preserving and extending youth, and youthful curiosity, learning, playfulness, and relationship building.

I denied anything was wrong: first because I was too blinded by love to see the cracks in my relationship, and later because I was too ashamed to admit that I had stayed for so long with a man who hurt me so much.

CIA claimed to find no evidence that “any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing” with any of the figures mentioned in “Dark Alliance,” including Ross and Blandón. The report did admit, however, that there were instances where the CIA did not, “in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” But to that it offered the curious caveat that, under an agreement in 1982 between Reagan attorney general William French Smith and the CIA, agents were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving nonemployees, defined as paid and nonpaid “assets.” The CIA’s admissions were major.

CIA claimed to find no evidence that “any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing” with any of the figures mentioned in “Dark Alliance,” including Ross and Blandón. The report did admit, however, that there were instances where the CIA did not, “in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” But to that it offered the curious caveat that, under an agreement in 1982 between Reagan attorney general William French Smith and the CIA, agents were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving nonemployees, defined as paid and nonpaid “assets.” The CIA’s admissions were major. They implicated the U.S. government in cocaine trafficking during the eighties, and therefore in some of the devastation of the crack epidemic. There was some attention paid to the report, but overall, the revelations came and went.

Resilience, psychologists say, is built on a foundation of caring and supportive relationships within and outside of families. “Relationships that create love and trust, provide role models and offer encouragement and reassurance help bolster a person’s resilience,” wrote Harvard psychiatrists J. Heidi Gralinski-Bakker and Stuart T. Hauser in their 2004 paper on resilience in vulnerable populations. If that’s true, then it appears Black identity—a construct assigned to the darker peoples of the world for the purpose of discrimination—has become a shield, membership in a club that offers care and support through the toughest times.

From his headquarters in Los Angeles, Bob Lorsch had entered the prepaid calling card space and built SmarTalk into a success. I was a VP at Salomon at the time and had heard stories about how crazy and fascinating Lorsch was, so I agreed to work with my colleague Mark Davis on a SmarTalk equity offering a year or so after the company’s IPO. We met at their Los Angeles offices at lunchtime. Lorsch burst into the room like a bad caricature of Danny DeVito, and even though I’d been warned that he was an unconventional CEO, I still wasn’t prepared for the encounter. We had put together the standard detailed presentation that analyzed the state of the public equity markets, how the SmarTalk stock had been performing, who owned it, et cetera. A young Salomon analyst who had been pulling all-nighters to assemble the books sat in a chair near the door. Mark and I passed around the presentation books. “So we’ve prepared a—” I started. “Just tell me,” Lorsch interjected. “Do we have Grubman or not?” Jack Grubman, Salomon’s famed equity analyst, had previously endorsed the SmarTalk IPO with a buy rating. “Yes,” Mark said. “We have Jack. We talked to him prior to the meeting and confirmed that he’ll continue to cover the company and support the offering.” “Then you’re hired,” Lorsch said with a smile, pushing his unopened book to the center of the table. “Let’s eat.” It seemed reckless to have made his decision on so little information, and I could only imagine how the analyst kid near the door felt, sleep-deprived and probably proud of his hard work, only to see the book tossed aside without so much as a cracking of the spine. While we ate the catered lunch that was delivered to the conference room, Mark mentioned that I was in the midst of planning my wedding for that summer. “Don’t get married!” Lorsch advised me. “Terrible, terrible idea.” He described a few of his own ill-fated unions, dropping in crude one-liners to punctuate the stories: “Why buy when you can rent? . . . If it flies, floats, or fucks, don’t buy it! . . .” Despite

Maybe we feel such a strong kinship with pique assiette because it is the visual metaphor that best describes us; after all, we spend much of our lives hurling bits of the figurative and literal past into the world’s landfill—and then regret it. We build our identities from that detritus of regret. Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. And aren’t these flaws the prerequisites of intimacy?

I don't want her. I want you." "I didn't see you making any effort to push her away." My voice cracked, broke. I couldn't stop the painful mental replay of the Bloomingdale scene. It was on a permanent loop in my mind. "She had a gun in her pocket," Jack said. "Are you sure that wasn't you?

...I was reading that, in some cultures, they don't throw away a piece of pottery just because it breaks. They pour gold into the cracks, and the piece is even more beautiful than it was before it broke." He turned his head and stared into me. "You broke our marriage. I'm hoping, after all this, we can end up with something beautiful.

It was when I nearly destroyed myself while in a relationship with a narcissist, that I came face-to-face with true evil. I'd never met someone so vile, so ugly, so disrespectful, so dishonorable and ultimately, so destructive. It took her mask to crack and begin to slip, for the fog of the Narcissistic Abuse I'd suffered while in that relationship, to begin to lift. Once the fog lifted, I began to see the lies, her deceitfulness, the manipulation, the never ending betrayal, her connivance, her false-self and conversely, her truth. Her truth being, that she's void, vapid and wrapped in a multilayered façade. A façade that keeps her shackled to her inner darkness and evil spirit. The lifting of the fog also helped me to see just how emotionally stunted she is, and that that emotional stuntedness makes her a liability. An expensive liability.

Mama covered her ears with her hands, but I knew she heard me. Tears streamed from her eyes and dribbled from her chin. Part of me wanted to blot her face with a tissue, real tender-like, but the evil me, the girl tired of keeping her feelings bottled up for fear I'd upset mama, was blissful at causing a commotion. Maybe it was cruel to make mama cry, but at least I had cracked her shell and got a reaction. Any response was better than talking to a zombie

Dandelions represent the easy way. You pick up a dandelion and it's so soft, and it's so easy and even fun sometimes to blow the seeds everywhere. And you don't even realize what you're doing. Nothing happens right then, except you get a pretty little show in the breeze. It's not until later, sometimes, a long time later, that you look out in your garden and realize what you did. It's easy, love, to pull back, to hide in yourself, to run and say you're just taking some time, to keep all of your emotions inside, maybe even to think you're protecting me from something. It would be easier still for me to let you do that. To watch you blow those dandelion seeds everywhere, and pretend it won't damage anything. To pretend we won't wake up one summer morning to discover we've allowed a huge patch of weeds to grow between us, opening up cracks in the foundation of our marriage. Thorns, on the other hand... they're not easy. They hurt. They make you want to give up on the whole plant sometimes. But if you don't give up, love, if you fight through it, allow yourself to be hurt - the result is beautiful and strong. And it will last forever if you care for it.