Dana White Quotes

Anyone who likes or hates Dana White should take a look at this.

Accept the limitations of the space you have, and declutter enough that your stuff fits comfortably in that space.

It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago "the Windy City.

My attention span and my available time and my caring-whatsoever-about-this-mess are not guaranteed to exist in Later Land, so I can’t go there.

Decluttering Question #1: If I needed this item, where would I look for it first? Take it there now. Decluttering Question #2: If I needed this item, would it ever occur to me that I already had one?

I can pick up a bad habit in three days flat and struggle for years to break it. A good habit, however, causes emotional angst and physical pain to create, but I can break it in less than twenty-four hours.

Reality: Sometimes, I turn things into problems that aren’t really problems just because I love thinking so much.

So the point of decluttering isn’t to get rid of things you want to keep; it’s to identify those things and then to make space to enjoy those things.

a common trait among people who struggle with clutter: they’re interesting, and they like interesting stuff.

I didn’t decide anything. I didn’t figure out anything. I just accepted that limits were limits. And accepting limits was strangely freeing.

Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would prevail. It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago “the Windy City.

Dali dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl- impossibly pale, luminous and lifeless as the moon.

Giving yourself permission to do something without the pressure of solving this never-ending problem once and for all is giving yourself permission to get started.

As long as you’re living, there will be new stuff coming in and old stuff that needs to leave. And that’s fine. Accepting this universal truth took me far in my own decluttering journey.

But once something leaves your house, it’s gone. And the more things leave, the more that layer becomes a non-issue and makes the other layers so much less overwhelming and quicker to tackle.

Keep Boxes don’t work. They let me put off making a final decision. I can temporarily place a particularly difficult item inside, confident that the future version of me will know what to do with it. Future Me doesn’t deserve that much credit, and honestly, she doesn’t appreciate the pressure.

I open the door and fall into the arms of the person in front of me. "Emerald, I am putting you into the bath right now." His voice is commanding, and I feel him dragging me along. My body is now engulfed in warm water; I open my eyes to stare at the white wall in front of me. ‪ The Passion To Live Sep 29 :-)

As I got rid of obviously worthless stuff, I started realizing I loved something else. I loved space. Open space. I had no idea how much I would love open space because I'd always filled every space that was mine.

Touch things. I’ve said it again and again. Look. Always, always look. Assuming what is in a box or at the back of a shelf does no good whatsoever. But assuming is the hardest thing for me to fight in my war against clutter. I see a mass of stuff and assume it’s full of emotions. I assume every last item in the pile, box, or closet will rip my heart right out of my chest. Every single item will represent a part of life I’m not ready to accept is over.

Outside of Piers Morgan’s home is a sign strategically positioned in the front of his property by the walkway. Its bold red-and-white typeface is a warning to all passersby: “Protected By Armed Response Security Systems.” James O’Keefe of Project Veritas discovered the sign as he sought signatures for a petition seeking to rid Hollywood films of all firearms. He took a photo of the sign and asked Morgan via Twitter “Hey, @piersmorgan, can you explain these signs on your Beverly Hills property?” Morgan could not, so he ignored it. While Morgan snores soundly in his bed, he has a security firm keep watch with a firearm and rush to Morgan’s defense if Morgan finds himself under threat. This way Morgan can pretend that he’s against firearms when, really, he’s just outsourced his gun. He is a royalist: He believes that commoners shouldn’t possess firearms, especially Americans. It’s the ultimate hypocrisy: Progressives view firearms as only situationally evil. They’re evil in the hands of anyone other than themselves or their security firms. Don

If you take four street corners, and on one they are playing baseball, on another they are playing basketball and on the other, street hockey. On the fourth corner, a fight breaks out. Where does the crowd go? They all go to the fight. Dana White UFC president April 2007, Las Vegas Sun News Interview

I’ve consciously decided to view my home as a place to live instead of a place to store all my great ideas and their attached stuff.

An amazing bargain that ultimately makes my life more difficult isn’t an amazing bargain at all.

It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago “the Windy City.

I stayed with you inside the room, as the warm white walls became a womb.

Ideas weren’t making a difference. The only thing that made a difference was actually doing something

Decluttering is stuff you don’t need leaving your house. And that’s really all it is. If five things leave or five hundred things leave, you’ve succeeded.

Envisioning perfection inhibits more than it inspires.

Remember your goals are “better” and “less,” so progress is everything.

If I feel like my head is going to explode over a decision that isn’t life changing, but feels totally life changing, I choose to declutter the item. Because no item is worth my head exploding.

The male commanders, drunk with the power of the Saka sword, were hesitant to embrace anything from their enemies. However, Tomyris, with her feminine wisdom, had no prejudice and gladly borrowed the best and most useful.

I’d forgotten the names of most of the plants, but back in Dana Ramos’s class I’d known them all. I only lived four years in New England, but I noticed more and learned more about what was around me there than I ever had in Indiana, and more than I ever would in LA, where there’s constantly something new and impossibly technicolor blooming on my street. I could still tell you a few of them, the stalwart trees and ephemeral flowers of New Hampshire: painted trillium, bunchberry, hemlock, sheep laurel, white cedar, bloodroot. Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made sugar out of nothing but light.

My grandmother, perhaps the biggest Elvis fan on earth, loved going to Memphis and visiting Graceland with her sister, daughter, and nieces. She had photo albums full of their trips; they’d go and she would take photos of the exact same things trip after trip. It was her mecca. She had a photo of Elvis’s headstone in various seasons, and you could watch her daughter and nieces grow up in a series of photos in front the mansion’s driveway gate. It was routine. I’ve come to regard Dianne Feinstein’s “assault weapons” press conferences in the same way. Every few years or so, Senator Feinstein calls a press conference, the D.C. version of theater, and plays Vanna White with guns strapped to whiteboards. You can watch her age through the years at these pressers via Google Images. She begins with a youthful plump to her cheeks, standing tall, holding up a rifle to her chest and as the years go by she takes on the posture of a cocktail shrimp and simply motions to the boards. I give her credit for her dedication to never learning a single thing about the firearms she proposes to ban. It takes devotion to remain ignorant about a topic when you spend decades discussing it.

Because of my love of excessive efficiency, my former decluttering efforts went something like this: Oh, this goes in the master bathroom. I’ll make a master bathroom pile here. That goes in the playroom, so I’ll make a playroom pile. These nails should be in the garage, so here’s a garage pile. Six piles later, life happened. I left the decluttering project to go take care of life with every intention of coming back as soon as I could. But I didn’t. Either more life happened, or I forgot. When I finally returned to the project a few hours (or a few days or a few months) later, those totally logical little piles had morphed into one big pile that was no longer the least bit sorted. The clutter that once drove me crazy while it sat behind the cabinet door or inside the drawer? Now it was out in the open, outside the area I was decluttering. I’d created a bigger mess.

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, by Ann Patchett There are also several podcasts on writing that I like, including these: Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing Write about Now, with Jonathan Small A Way with Words, with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett Mad Dogs & Englishmen, with Kevin Williamson and Charles C. W. Cooke (this isn’t a podcast about language, but their command of English is incredible)

Martin Luther King Jr. was denied a gun permit as a result of gun control laws put into effect by white male Democrats. Out of all the law-abiding, peace-loving people, this man was denied the means to protect himself while those who wished to do him harm for believing in equality were allowed to carry. Dr. King was disarmed by Democrat laws. That is just one in a series of examples of the explicit racism behind left-wing gun grabs. It should be taught in schools, how the origination of modern-day gun control laws were designed to prevent racial equality.

one of the finest sights that I have ever seen, was an albatross asleep upon the water, during a calm, off Cape Horn, when a heavy sea was running. There being no breeze, the surface of the water was unbroken, but a long, heavy swell was rolling, and we saw the fellow, all white, directly ahead of us, asleep upon the waves, with his head under his wing; now rising on the top of a huge billow, and then falling slowly until he was lost in the hollow between. He was undisturbed for some time, until the noise of our bows, gradually approaching, roused him, when, lifting his head, he stared upon us for a moment, and then spread his wide wings and took his flight.

As she looked in the full-length mirror in her dressing room, she added a few ropes of pearls, pinned a white silk camellia, and draped the Chantilly lace shawl. In that moment, Dana thought of fashion's most enduring icon who created this elegant and alluring style, and the happy personal life that eluded her. Mademoiselle Chanel died in 1971 at the age of eighty-eight while working on her spring collection, but her passion for work did not fill the void of marriage and children. Her success was costly, but clearly the choice of an uncompromising woman determined to achieve greatness on her own. She once said, "I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

But influential business leaders were eager proponents of numbers-driven merit pay for teachers. Ross Perot, for example, pushed Dallas to implement a plan to use test scores alone to evaluate teachers and distribute pay increases. So it was ironic that private industry had, by the 1980s, mostly turned away from efforts to pay white-collar workers according to strict productivity measures, finding that such formal evaluation programs were too expensive and time-consuming to create and implement. Research showed that companies with merit pay schemes did not perform better financially than did organizations without it, nor were their employees happier. Instead, management gurus recommended that workers be judged primarily by the holistic standards of individual supervisors.

Chicago’s population had topped one million for the first time, making the city the second most populous in the nation after New York, although disgruntled residents of Philadelphia, previously in second place, were quick to point out that Chicago had cheated by annexing large expanses of land just in time for the 1890 decadal census. Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would prevail. It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago “the Windy City.

In addition to bearing him thirteen children, Soya was privileged to copy the 1,225-page War and Peace by hand eight times while Tolstoy was editing it, because Tolstoy needed clean drafts to send along to the publisher. She also helped him work on the less famous but equally essential book Resurrection about the many women he cheated on with her. In the final weeks of his life, the increasingly radical Tolstoy left his wife without telling her, refused to see her when she tracked him down, and then died ij a train station. But at least Soya was comforted by the fact Tolstoy also made sure that they never had any money. At this point he had already freed his serfs, renounced his title, and given away most of his wealth to the poor. Instead of his wife and kids, he left the entirety of his estate and future royalties to the fringe Doukhobor spiritual movement. Tolstoy was selected for the first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, but he turned it down because he knew the prize money would complicate things in his life, What could a man with a wife and about a dozen children possibly need money for?

So,” John said, “I’ll meet you at your place at eight, and we can walk over together?” “What? For what?” “The vigil.” “I’m not going to that.” I tried to ignore his surprise, his dogged faith. “Of course you are.” “I don’t know this person.” John continued to stand there, arms hanging down. The knife skidded so much I lost my grip and had to pick it up again. “It could’ve been you,” he said finally. “No,” I said, chopping bluntly, breaking more than slicing the lettuce, “it couldn’t. I’ve worked my whole life so that it couldn’t be me.” White flash of a face. Where did they go, those boys, after they left us behind? “Last night,” John began. He paused, still looking wounded. “You were so happy.” I gathered the lettuce into a bin and held it against my stomach like a barrier. “If it had been me, it would’ve been your fault.” John reeled as though I’d struck him. “You’re a coward,” he said. “You’ve worked your whole life because you’re a coward.” “What do you know? What do you know about anything?” His family moved for him. The hormones. The surgery he was allowed to accept or reject. I waved my arm around the kitchen, at the stunned cooks watching us. “Nobody has to know about you! You can blend in whenever you want!” “You honestly believe that? You think my life’s been easy?” “Yes, I think it’s been fucking easy!” I screamed. “They don’t know! I didn’t know! I wish I still didn’t know!” I tried to shove past him. He touched my back. I remembered Humphrey Bogart’s hand, I remembered dancing, I remembered the gown twirling, I remembered the boy who complimented my ass, I remembered being told I was beautiful. I remembered the woman staring back at me in the Métro windows, her wink. I tried to pull away. John embraced me with my arms pinned to my sides, the lettuce bin between us, its raw, wet smell pushed toward our faces. In full view of the entire kitchen, he kissed me. A kiss that made me think of the woefully few people I had kissed in my life. A kiss that reminded me I had never been loved. A kiss that said I could not be John unless I risked being Dana.   My

When we first started dating, my talent in the kitchen was a turn-on. The prospect of me in the kitchen, wearing a skimpy apron and holding a whisk in my hand- he thought that was sexy. And, as someone with little insight into how to work her own sex appeal, I pounced on the opportunity to make him want and need me. I spent four days preparing my first home-cooked meal for him, a dinner of wilted escarole salad with hot bacon dressing, osso bucco with risotto Milanese and gremolata, and a white-chocolate toasted-almond semifreddo for dessert. At the time, I lived with three other people in a Columbia Heights town house, so I told all of my housemates to make themselves scarce that Saturday night. When Adam showed up at my door, as the rich smell of braised veal shanks wafted through the house, I greeted him holding a platter of prosciutto-wrapped figs, wearing nothing but a slinky red apron. He grabbed me by the waist and pushed me into the kitchen, slowly untying the apron strings resting on my rounded hips, and moments later we were making love on the tiled kitchen floor. Admittedly, I worried the whole time about when I should start the risotto and whether he'd even want osso bucco once we were finished, but it was the first time I'd seduced someone like that, and it was lovely. Adam raved about that meal- the rich osso bucco, the zesty gremolata, the sweet-and-salty semifreddo- and that's when I knew cooking was my love language, my way of expressing passion and desire and overcoming all of my insecurities. I learned that I may not be comfortable strutting through a room in a tight-fitting dress, but I can cook one hell of a brisket, and I can do it in the comfort of my own home, wearing an apron and nothing else. Adam loved my food, and he loved watching me work in the kitchen even more, the way my cheeks would flush from the heat of the stove and my hair would twist into delicate red curls along my hairline. As the weeks went by, I continued to seduce him with pork ragu and roasted chicken, creamed spinach and carrot sformato, cannolis and brownies and chocolate-hazelnut cake.

Dana said Cleveland had a “plodding mind, limited knowledge and narrow capacities.” After the Maria Halpin story broke, Dana wrote, “We do not believe that the American people will knowingly elect to the Presidency a coarse debauchee who would bring his harlots with him to Washington and hire lodgings for them convenient to the White House.

I once thought of habits as things I do without thinking. Like stealing candy out of my kid’s Halloween bucket on November 1. A minute ago, I was at my computer, and now I’m standing in a different room stuffing my face with Skittles. I don’t even know how I got here. Bad habits. I have lots of those. I assumed when people talked about cleaning habits they would work the same way, but they don’t. They so don’t. I have never once found myself dusting and thought, “How in the world did I get here? I don’t even remember grabbing the duster!

Doing the dishes is the first step of this whole change-your-house process. Doing them again tomorrow is where the magic will happen.

Here’s what I had to accept: Cleaning my house is not a project. It’s a series of boring, mundane, repetitive tasks. The people whose homes are clean all the time do these boring, mundane, repetitive tasks.

How will progress ever happen if I keep going back to work on the same area? Progress won’t happen if I don’t.

This strategy worked well, but I stopped doing it. Why do I stop doing something that is working? I have two theories. First, life happened, and this routine fizzled. I probably missed every Tuesday for a month because other things kept coming up. Second, I was used to all my methods fizzling. I expected them to fizzle. I waited for the fizzle. I didn’t fight for this one to not fizzle.

Go. Experience. Wash dishes. Declutter. Your Slob Vision will clear with each routine you establish. Your home will improve with each step you take.

Ideas weren’t making a difference. The only thing that made a difference was actually doing something. Cleaning with whatever I had on hand, whether it was the perfect thing or not.

Nodding your head in agreement or shaking it in disgust as you read a book or browse the Internet does nothing to improve your home. You are the only one who can improve your home, and you can’t know what works until you experience what works.

Anti-Defamation League reported roughly a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents between 2015 and 2019, to a record level. And Americans saw their country being torn apart by race. As recently as 2013, 70 percent of Americans believed there were good relations between white and Black people, Gallup polling found. That plunged among both Black and white Americans as Trump rose in 2015, and by 2021, only 42 percent said relations were good. —

But because it’s exactly the type of advice someone would give who has never struggled with irrational feelings of attachment to a plastic giraffe, I’ll share some additional thoughts.

It’s a relief to the twenty-first-century viewer when this mercifully short sequence comes to an end, but there is also a certain satisfaction in seeing a white man in blackface experience something unusual in the long history of the form: consequences.

Two things happen when a room isn’t defined: it becomes a storage room (and storage rooms aren’t good places to hang out or to sleep), or it becomes a dumping ground for temporary things that become less temporary and eventually turn into storage.

It’s a mind-set. And the mind-set is that life is better and easier with less. And it’s better to live without something you might use than to have something you don’t use. Start erring on the side of getting rid of things. Be willing to risk not having something that you truly might wish you had one day. Maybes are nos. What-ifs become let’s-assume-probably-nots. And wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-haves turn into I’m-sure-I-could-get-replacements.

Decluttering is about identifying the stuff you really want to keep, in a way that

As long as you actually sell them. I have an entire chapter about how deciding to donate instead of selling significantly accelerated my decluttering progress.

As I got rid of obviously worthless stuff, I started realizing I loved something else. I loved space.

I used to have a dream (an actual, when-you're-asleep dream). Maybe you've had it too. In this dream I find rooms in my home that I hadn't known existed. I'm so, so excited they're there, and I'm relieved to learn my house is bigger than I thought it was.

And while it will never be fun, I still find myself shocked by how much easier it is when I don’t have to catch up on daily stuff and decluttering (or, honestly, Stuff Shifting) first.

When I began decluttering like my sanity depended on it, I simply did not have time to use my complicated systems. I just donated.

Once I made the decision to donate everything, I felt incredible freedom, and I was able to move through my clutter so much more quickly. I made the decision about whether something needed to stay in my house or not, and that was the end of it.

Mind-set. That’s what this is. A change in my perspective. A difference in my ultimate goal for my home. A desire to have less stress by having less stuff.

I kept them, but I also used them. Using them freed me to keep these keepsakes without guilt.

By making a final decision about the fate of each item as you pick it up and then acting on that decision (trashing it, donating it, or taking it where it goes immediately), at any point when you get distracted, you’ve made progress. There are no Keep Piles or Keep Boxes to deal with later.

Macbeth [1623]: A Scottish warrior gets pressured into murdering his king by three random witches and also his wife. Women, am I right?

King Lear [1608]: A king goes mad after dividing his kingdom between two disloyal daughters. Women, am I right?

When you “take it there now,” you can stop at any point, and your space is better off—with less stuff in it than it had when you started. Less stuff equals decluttering success.

A decision that’s waiting to be made is stressful, even if I don’t realize it’s stressing me.

Some anti-2A advocates (who simultaneously lecture people of faith) themselves have faith that firearms are magical creatures who discriminately creep around wealthy white schools and neighborhoods to shoot up people. When this happens in places like Chicago or Detroit it’s called “gangs” or “drug-related violence,” but everywhere else it’s called “an epidemic” of inanimate objects causing destruction.

Life is too short to marinate in mediocrity. Become the leader you were made to be.

When I became the White House press secretary, my mom looked me up and was shocked and upset by the things she read. I told her that we needed a rule—she could not put my name in any search engine under any circumstances. And she couldn’t go searching for the criticism either. My advice is to ignore the chatter. (It’s amazing—if you’re not listening, you can’t hear it!) If criticism builds to a point where you or someone on your behalf needs to respond, the chances are it will be brought to your attention. You don’t need to go searching for negativity. Trust me—it’ll find you.

In 1899 the Supreme Court ruled in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education that Augusta, Georgia, had not defied the Constitution by shutting down its one black high school while continuing to operate its white high school.

The school’s principal, Bennetta Washington, was married to the city’s future mayor, Walter Washington, and was a politically connected reformer willing to take a chance on a young white woman.

I’ve never taken shots of stars before,” Violet says. “How do you do it?” “You start with as wide an f-stop as the lens will allow. I like a shutter speed of about twenty seconds. Manual mode—” “But wouldn’t they be blurry like that?” I smile. “The secret—turn the white balance off and set the optical resolution to the highest setting. Bada bing. Bada boom.” Click-click-click.

Less” and “better” are more effective goals to work toward than “finished” or “done.

I attach emotions to stuff. I let things represent my feelings for the person who gave them to me or the stage of life I was in when I obtained them. This is why I can’t use emotions to declutter. If I assess each item according to how it makes me feel, I will want to keep it. All of it. “Keeping it all” is what caused my house to get out of control.

decluttering without using emotions is the driving force for the steps in my decluttering process.

This frees me because I get to blame the container. Once I realized the purpose of a container was to contain, I accepted that limits were a thing. I don’t have to assess the value or future potential usefulness of every item in my house.

Most of all, I realized my family deserves space in the container that is our house more than anything else, so the more stuff I crowd in, the harder it is for my family to function in our home in the way they need to function.

When my mother and I had first fled to Austin, we didn’t live anywhere near this lake. Instead, we settled in Pflugerville, a suburb just north of the city limits. It was a town of graveyards, white flight, and SUVs with stickers of Caitlin or Grant above a soccer ball or baseball bat on the rear window. It was a land of unnecessary “pf”s to show pride in the town name. Strip malls

It’s those very setbacks, detours, trials, and life transitions that become steppingstones on the path to your brilliant destination. All the while, your intuition orchestrates amazing miracles and signs around you. The key is to trust your gut and the signs crossing your path. Some of the divine signs include: • Red Cardinal Birds • Rainbows • Butterflies • Deer • Angelic Encounters • Vivid dreams of departed loved ones, friends, & pets • Triple Digits • White Feather • Plus, so much more

Likewise, in the eleventh-hour simulations atop the rocket at the Cape. Al showed only one sign of stress: the cycles—Smilin’ Al/Icy Commander—now came one on top of the other, in the same place, and alternated so suddenly that the people around him couldn’t keep track. They learned a little more about the mysterious Al Shepard here in the eleventh hour. Smilin’ Al was a man who wanted very much to be liked, even loved, by those around him. He wanted not just their respect but also their affection. Now, in April, on the eve of the great adventure, Smilin’ Al was more jovial and convivial than ever. He did his José Jiménez routine. His great grin spread wider and his great beer-call eyes beamed brighter than ever before. Smilin’ Al was crazy about a comedy routine that had been developed by a comedian named Bill Dana. It concerned the Cowardly Astronaut and was a great hit. Dana portrayed the Cowardly Astronaut as a stupid immigrant Mexican named José Jiménez, whose tongue wrapped around the English language like a taco. The idea was to interview Astronaut Jiménez like a news broadcaster. You’d say things like: “What has been the most difficult part of astronaut training, José?” “Obtaining de maw-ney, señor.” “The money? What for?” “For de bus back to Mejico, you betcha, reel queeck, señor.” “I see. Well, now, José, what do you plan to do once you’re in space?” “Gonna cry a lot, I theeeenk.” Smilin’ Al used to crack up over this routine. He liked to do the José Jiménez part; and if he could get someone to feed him the straight lines, he was in Seventh Heaven, Smilin’ Al version. Feed him the lines for his José Jiménez knock-off, and he’d treat you like the best beer-call good buddy you ever had. Of course, the Cowardly Astronaut routine was also a perfectly acceptable way for bringing up, on the oblique, as it were, the subject of the righteous stuff that the first flight into space would require. But that was probably unconscious on Al’s part. The main thing seemed to be the good fun, the camaraderie, the closeness and blustery affection of the squadron on the eve of battle. In these moments you saw Smilin’ Al supreme. And in the next moment— —some poor Air Force lieutenant, thinking this was the same Smilin’ Al he had been joking and carrying on with last night, would sing out, “Hey, Al! Somebody wants you on the phone!”—and all at once there would be Al, seething with an icy white fury, hissing out: “If you have something to tell me, Lieutenant … you will call me ‘Sir’!” And the poor devil wouldn’t know what hit him. Where the hell did that freaking arctic avalanche come from? And then he would realize that … all at once the Icy Commander was back in town.

The core problem of Stuff Shifting is procrastinating on making decisions. I counted on future me to know what to do.

force yourself to make a final decision about each item as you deal with it.

Piles and Keep Boxes seem more efficient, but they are actually just procrastination stations.

The locations’ familiar white-tiled neutrality was like the blank slate of a movie screen, a backdrop against which all sorts of urban encounters might happen.

Grieving is the process of emotionally navigating a loss. Navigating the loss of a dream is where grief can come as a surprise. It's possible to grieve something you never had.

Fantasy: If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Reality: While I’m busy searching for the best way to do something, I’m not getting anything done. Meanwhile, the problem gets worse and is much harder to solve when I finally get around to solving it.

Sometimes, Worrying About the Very Best Way Keeps Me from Doing Anything

I gave myself the same pep talk I’d given my drama students and my own kids over the years: Most things that look easy are skills. Skills can be learned.

Are you keeping these things because you love them, or because you feel guilty about not keeping them? Can you use them?

I don’t know about your family’s quirks, but mine has this weird obsession with wearing clothes. Like, every single day.

I was in the prime of my time as the maiden, the magic of the middle – not yet the mother and far from the crone. My supple, small breasts were not yet deflated from years of nursing sweet babies. My strong, smooth stomach hadn’t expanded in the mysterious, magical way it would, to grow another human. My skin was yet to be speckled in white spots, ravaged by too many summers. As the years passed, my looks would fade, the lines around my eyes would grow deeper, and I would become a different kind of beautiful.

Every time I felt the relief of not needing to determine the value (monetary, emotional, whatever) of something and instead asked myself whether it fit into the container I had for it, I started looking for more ways to put this drama-free strategy to work. No angst. No emotion. No analysis. I just picked out my favorites, put them in the container, and knew that when the container was full, anything left wasn’t as loved as the ones in the container. This made decluttering easy, or at least doable.

Grieving is the process of emotionally navigating a loss. Navigating the loss of a dream is where grief can come as a surprise. It’s possible to grieve something you never had. This is what so many people grieving the loss of a loved one are experiencing. The loss of a loved one’s presence is devastating, but grief returns in waves as time brings reminders of things that should have happened for that one who is gone. A parent who loses a child also loses the opportunity to visit colleges with that child. A wife who loses her husband loses the partner who was supposed to be there to help make daunting decisions. And that’s what is important to understand about grief: There are stages, and walking through those stages isn’t only important, it’s necessary. And unfortunately, unavoidable. Prince Harry of England was interviewed in 2017 on Bryony Gordon’s Mad World podcast. He shared that at the age of twenty-eight he finally faced his grief over his mother’s death, sixteen years after she’d been gone. For years he thought he could avoid grief, but he couldn’t. He had to walk through it. There isn’t any way to get around grief. There’s only walking through, and even then it’s not about coming out on the other side unscathed. It’s about coming out a changed person. The stages of grief are real. Knowing what the phases are doesn’t prevent hurt, and getting through them doesn’t mean you forget. But understanding that the phases are legitimate and identifying your own stage in the process can help you feel a little less crazy. A lot of my own clutter is directly linked to denial. I have to fight against living in denial. If something is unpleasant or stressful, I’ll purposely deny it. Ignore it. If I think an e-mail is going to say something I don’t want to hear, I put off opening it. But

It was a salt-and-pepper emerald-cut diamond surrounded by a halo of baguette-cut white diamonds. Had I known what any of that meant before I picked it out? No. But I asked around her friends, paid attention to her Pinterest boards, and ignored every single piece of advice any of my friends had to give.

The cement-paved market is a straight shot from end to end, lined on either side by butchers, cheesemongers, and grocers selling everything from chicken feet to lettuce. The steep, hipped roof rises nearly fifty feet, traversed by white metal scaffolding, and what little sunlight there is today pours through the skylights and windows lining the walls. The air carries a funky mustiness, the combination of aged cheese mixed with fresh fish and bread hot from the oven. A crowd is gathered at the far end of the market in front of the Market Lunch, which serves some of the best blueberry pancakes and crab cakes in town.