Grinding Everyday Quotes

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.

I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.

Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is useful.

It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering - it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at the secret self which smolders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquility of a man like me - sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am - but judge us not. In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice - the long luxury of your freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now.

The only thing more overwhelming than the need for order was the difficulty of getting there.

My theology was too big to touch a typical day in my life. I'd developed the habit of ignoring God in the midst of the daily grind.

But in Christian worship we are reminded that peace is homegrown, beginning on the smallest scale, in the daily grind, in homes, churches, and neighborhoods. Daily habits of peace or habits of discord spill into our city, creating cultures of peace or cultures of discord.

Little phrases such as “I’m sorry to trouble you,” “Would you be so kind as to—?” “Won’t you please?” “Would you mind?” “Thank you”—little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life—and, incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

Little phrases such as “I’m sorry to trouble you,” “Would you be so kind as to ----?” “Won’t you please?” “Would you mind?” “Thank you”-little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life-and, incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

A little brain science: ADHD primarily affects our prefrontal cortex, the seat of our executive functions. This part of the brain controls what we pay attention to, how we respond, and what thoughts have the floor at any given time.[2]

Little phrases such as ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ ‘Would you be so kind as to—?’ ‘Won’t you please?’ ‘Would you mind?’ ‘Thank you’—little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life—and incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

If you take nothing else from this chapter, remember this: you won’t just do it. Getting organized is not a matter of simply buckling down and trying harder. If you’re currently unhappy with the level of disorganization in your life, take some time to figure out why that is — and what you’re looking for. You need a reason for getting organized that will be its own reward. Something that will make you feel so good, you won’t want to lose it, and even if you do, you’ll fight to get it back. Humans, and especially humans with ADHD, need to feel compelled by something urgent and important.

•I lost money in every way possible: I misplaced checks and sometimes found them when they were too old to take to the bank. If I did find them in time, I missed out on the interest they could’ve made in my savings account. I paid late fees on bills, even though I had money in the bank — I’d just forgotten to pay them or lost the bill in my piles. I bought new items because they were on sale with a rebate, but forgot to mail the rebate form. •I dealt with chronic health worries because I never scheduled doctor’s appointments. •I lived in constant fear of being “found out” by people who held me in high regard. I always felt others’ trust in me was misplaced. •I suffered from nonstop anxiety, waiting for the other shoe to drop. •I struggled to create a social life in our new home. I either felt I didn’t have time because I needed to catch up and calm some of the chaos, or I wasn’t organized enough to make plans in the first place. •I felt insecure in all my relationships, both personal and professional. •I had nowhere to retreat. My life was such a mess, I had no space to gather my thoughts or be by myself. Chaos lurked everywhere. •I rarely communicated with long-distance friends or family. •I wanted to write a book and publish articles in magazines, yet dedicated almost no time to my creative pursuits.

it’s easy to feel ashamed when you fail at a basic adult task like paying the cable bill, meeting a friend for coffee, or acknowledging that all the rooms in your house exist. It’s easy to get personal, call yourself mean names, and throw in the towel. But you still have to fix it, just like you have to take the car to the mechanic.

The fanciest grade of green tea in Japan goes by the name of gyokuro, meaning "jade dew." It consists of the newest leaves of a tea plantation's oldest tea bushes that bud in May and have been carefully protected from the sun under a double canopy of black nylon mesh. The leaves are then either steeped in boiled water or ground into a powder to make matcha (literally, "grind tea"), the thick tea served at a tea ceremony. (The powder used to make the thin tea served at a tea ceremony comes from grinding the older leaves of young tea plants, resulting in a more bitter-tasting tea.) The middle grade of green tea is called sencha, or "brew tea," and is made from the unprotected young tea leaves that unfurl in May or June. The leaves are usually steeped in hot water to yield a fragrant grassy brew to enjoy on special occasions or in fancy restaurants. For everyday tea, the Japanese buy bancha. Often containing tiny tea twigs, it consists of the large, coarse, unprotected leaves that remain on the tea bush until August. When these leaves are roasted, they become a popular tea called hojicha. When hojicha combines with popped roasted brown rice, a tea called genmaicha results.

The belief that momentary feelings of unity or visions of perfection can survive permanently into everyday life this side of eternity is the ante-room of nihilism and fascism. Such beliefs give rise to ahistorical fantasies, which can never materialize beyond the notion. To the extent that they are relentlessly pursued, they progressively crush the moments of solace that precious moments of grace can in fact convey. Historically such fantasies have spawned generations of cynics, misanthropes and failed revolutionaries who, having glimpsed resolution, cannot forgive the grinding years of imperfect life that still must be lived.

We get uncontrollably distracted by random thoughts and stuff happening around us (people chatting near our desk, remembering we were supposed to send Uncle Steve a birthday card, a spider building a web in the corner, you name it). We make impulsive decisions without thinking things through. We have a lot of inertia. Once we start an activity, we may have trouble stopping when we need to (even if that means dropping the ball on something important). We don’t read or listen to instructions carefully (this makes paperwork especially arduous). We can have a hard time completing tasks in the right order. We struggle to organize our behavior and tasks in a way that makes sense.

All this to say, ADHD isn’t your fault. You aren’t selfish, reckless, or irresponsible by nature. Most people seem to have a double standard for chemical imbalances in the brain, as opposed to elsewhere in the body. One would not — we hope! — tell a person with Type I Diabetes to try harder because everyone’s blood sugar gets out of whack sometimes. We’d expect this person to maintain their condition with insulin and a healthy diet so they could live a normal life. Why would we expect someone with a chemical imbalance in the brain to correct it by sheer force of will when we don’t expect them to do it with their pancreas? The sooner you accept your ADHD as a part of your unique biology, not as a personal failing, the sooner you can begin to build a better life for yourself

What is ADHD, anyway? For those still wondering what ADHD is, here’s the briefest summary I can muster: ADHD shows up in two areas of our brain function: working memory and executive functioning.[7] Working memory allows us to hold more than one thing in our brains at once. If you’ve ever run up the stairs, only to find yourself standing in your bedroom wondering what you came for, you’ve experienced a failure of working memory. Again, everyone experiences this from time to time. People with ADHD experience it nonstop, to the point where it impairs our ability to function normally. Working memory holds onto information until we’re able to use it.[8] In addition to forgetting why we opened the refrigerator, having a leaky working memory means we lose information before our brains can move it to long-term storage. We forget a lot of things before we have a chance to act on them or write them down. Our executive functions, on the other hand, give us the power to delay gratification, strategize, plan ahead, and identify and respond to others’ feelings.[9] That’s some list, isn’t it? In the same way a diabetic’s body cannot effectively regulate insulin, imagine your brain being unable to control these behaviors. This explains why ADHDers’ behavior so often defies norms and expectations for their age group — and this persists throughout their lifespan, not just grade school. ADHD isn’t a gift. It isn’t a sign of creativity or intelligence, nor is it a simple character flaw. And it’s more than eccentric distractibility, forgetfulness, and impulsivity. ADHD is a far-reaching disorder that touches every aspect of our lives. If we leave it unchecked, it will generate chaos at home, at work, and everywhere in between.

To be free requires that we are not marionettes whose strings are pulled by physical law. Whether the laws are deterministic (as in classical physics) or probabilistic (as in quantum physics) is of deep significance to how reality evolves and to the kinds of predictions science can make. But for assessing free will, the distinction is irrelevant. If the fundamental laws can continually churn, never grinding to a halt for lack of human input and applying all the same even if particles happen to inhabit bodies and brains, then there is no place for free will. Indeed, as is affirmed by every scientific experiment and observation ever conducted, long before we humans came on the scene the laws ruled without interruption; after we arrived, they continued to rule without interruption. To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles. Shake my hand and particles constituting your hand push up and down against those constituting mine. Say hello, and particles constituting your vocal cords jostle particles of air in your throat, setting off a chain reaction of colliding particles that ripples through the air, knocking into the particles constituting my eardrums, setting off a surge of yet other particles in my head, which is how I manage to hear what you’re saying. Particles in my brain respond to the stimuli, yielding the thought that’s a strong grip, and sending signals carried by other particles to those in my arm, which drive my hand to move in tandem with yours. And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progression of particles than we can change the value of pi. Our choices seem free because we do not witness nature’s laws acting in their most fundamental guise; our senses do not reveal the operation of nature’s laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities. As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our autonomous choices. However, if we had the superhuman vision invoked earlier and were able to analyze everyday reality at the level of its fundamental constituents, we would recognize that our thoughts and behaviors amount to complex processes of shifting particles that yield a powerful sense of free will but are fully governed by physical law.

BOTTOM LINE: ASSUME YOU’LL FORGET EVERYTHING AND ACT ACCORDINGLY

If you fill your calendar with items that don’t “absolutely have to get done that day,” writes David Allen in Getting Things Done, “it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do.

Don’t set yourself up to fail by watering down your calendar. Make sure it contains only items that are time-sensitive, and only on the day they are most important.

Snow vanquishes the mundane. It brings the everyday to a grinding halt and delays our ability to address our dreary responsibilities. Snow opens up the reign of the children, high on their unexpected liberty, daredevil and impervious to the cold. In this glistening white space, they feel the burgeoning of their own power.

Little phrases such as “I’m sorry to trouble you,” “Would you be so kind as to ———?” “Won’t you please?” “Would you mind?” “Thank you”: Little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life—and, incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

Its a matter of time that the money I make become a financial cake that I could eat everyday.

LENTILS WITH SAUSAGES { LENTILLES AUX SAUCISSES } My friend Fabienne makes this dish at the drop of a hat, because it’s quick, simple, satisfying, and delicious! Traditional vegetables in a dish like this are carrots, celery, onions, and perhaps fennel, which make it so flavorful. Sometimes it’s fun to go a bit wild, though, as Fabienne says. “I use red bell pepper,” she said. “It gives the dish exciting color and flavor.” Whichever vegetables you use, be sure to dice them so they blend in nicely. This calls for a hearty red, from Cahors. NOTE: You need delicious pork for this recipe. I’ve suggested kielbasa and slab bacon; use pork belly or unsmoked bacon, salt pork that you’ve boiled in fresh water twice first, or fresh pork sausages. 1 tablespoon duck fat or extra-virgin olive oil 2 medium onions, diced 1 small red bell pepper, seeds and pith removed Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 large clove garlic, green germ removed, minced 1 cup (250g) green lentils (ideally lentilles de Puy), picked over for small stones, rinsed 1 bouquet garni 1 (8-ounce; 250g) Morteau or kielbasa, cut into ½-inch (1.2cm) rounds 2 to 3 fresh sausages (about 8 ounces; 250g total), cut into 2-inch (5cm) pieces 6 ounces (180g) lean slab bacon, cut into 1-inch (2.5cm) chunks Fresh flat-leaf parsley, for garnish Grainy mustard, for serving Melt the duck fat in a medium, heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the onions and bell pepper and stir. Season with salt and black pepper and cook until the onions are translucent, stirring frequently so they don’t stick, about 6 minutes. Add the garlic and stir. Add the lentils, stir, and add water to cover them by 1 inch (2.5cm). Add the bouquet garni, pushing it under the water. Raise the heat to medium-high and when the water boils, reduce the heat to medium so it is simmering, partially cover, and cook until the lentils begin to soften, about 15 minutes. Add the meats, pushing them into the lentils, and additional water if necessary to make sure that the lentils are moist. Return the liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat to maintain a simmer and cook, partially covered, until the lentils are “al dente” and not too soft, 15 to 20 minutes more. Remove from the heat and ladle into four shallow soup bowls. Garnish with a generous grind of black pepper and a parsley leaf. Serve immediately with the mustard alongside. SERVES 4

Samsāra was one name for the wheel of life and death, the stupidity we wander through, lost, until we find enlightenment and get to join with the divine. All the shit that hurts so much. The big things like death and loss and pain and also just the everyday grind of eating and sleeping and wanting and wanting and wanting—that was samsāra. You were supposed to want to get out of it. You were supposed to look for the exit, the golden ticket that could take you to the chocolate factory. Escape from New York. This way to the egress.

All of these things left me feeling anxiety, panic, guilt, and dread every single day.

Life with ADHD tends toward chaos, leaving us in a near-constant state of course correction. From now on, you’ll define yourself not by your success this week or next, but by how you manage to claw your way out of the chaos and back onto the organizing wagon.

You can’t wait three months to read a book and learn how to get organized. By then you’ll have accrued more late fees on your bills, gotten into 87 more arguments with your spouse, and perhaps invited a rodent infestation into your messy kitchen.

Most important, I want you to know you needn’t feel ashamed. Never, ever let shame kill your motivation to get better.

Bottom line: ADHD provides an explanation and a reason for a lot of things, but be very careful about using it as an excuse.

You win some, you lose some. You try and sometimes fail. You grind, grin, and win. You love and remember loss. Everyday is a new day. Every moment another chance. Every road a new sight. All that matters is that you keep going. Stay as present as you can. Spend your time well. Choose your emotions as much as you can. But above all, choose love as much as you can. Forgive sincerely. Laugh fully. Hug closely. Kiss deeply. Leave nothing unsaid. Look straight into stars and sunsets and tears. Hold on. Hold each other. Hold close to all that matters to your heart. To dreams and smiles and people. The rodeo is life. You’re the rider. Saddle up, ride hard, and hold on tight. But whatever you do. Just keep on riding.

Finally, June was a month of great importance to Vesta. From 7 to 15, the secret room of her temple was open to matrons who went there barefoot to pray to the goddess. The Vestalia of 9 June involved millers and bakers who, on that day, gave a holiday to the donkeys that were condemned to keeping the mills turning. They were garlanded with flowers, together with their machines for grinding the grain. The garlands hung round their necks were laden with bread rolls, for Vesta was the goddess of the fire that baked them.

If, for example, the waitress brings us mashed potatoes when we have ordered French fried, let's say: "I'm sorry to trouble you, but I prefer French fried." She'll probably reply, "No trouble at all" and will be glad to change the potatoes, because we have shown respect for her. Little phrases such as "I'm sorry to trouble you," "Would you be so kind as to ----? " "Won't you please?" " Would you mind?" "Thank you" - little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life- and, incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

Store-bought spices are often sprayed with preservatives to extend shelf life, and yet they lose potency over time. Purchase spices whole and grinds small amounts at a time. Preserve them in airtight glass jars to keep them fresh. Pantry Whole mung beans Split mung beans, also called yellow dal or moong dal Basmati rice Ghee, or grass-fed unsalted butter to make your own Extra-virgin olive oil Coconut oil Apple cider vinegar Tamari (a Japanese variety of soy sauce that is gluten-free and preservative-free) Almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds Shredded coconut Cocoa powder Raw honey Maple syrup Jaggery or Sucanat Fresh produce Lemons, limes, citrus, in season Apples, berries, seasonal fruits Root vegetables, like carrots, sweet potatoes, turnips, according to season Leafy greens, in season Seasonal favorites like avocado, broccoli, pumpkin Fresh peas and green beans Fresh cilantro, parsley, other herbs Spices/herbs Spring: Ground ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, black pepper, cayenne, or red pepper flakes Summer: Ground coriander, turmeric, fennel seeds, mint, dill Autumn: Ground ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, whole nutmeg, fenugreek Winter: Ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, turmeric, fenugreek General: Mustard seeds (brown), pink or sea salt, whole peppercorns Miscellaneous Whole-milk plain yogurt Dates

Build [systems] around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. In other words, find your Why and get to know yourself. In your eagerness to get an organizational system up and running, make sure you’re motivated for the long term. Know why you’re doing this work — why it’s important to you. Motivation must come from within.