Katrina Kenison Quotes

When we focus on what is good and beautiful in someone, whether or not we think that they "deserve" it, the good and beautiful are strengthened merely by the light of our attention.

We are the windows through which our children first see the world. Let us be conscious of the view.

Life finds its balance. Children grow up. Second chances come along. In the meantime, I could choose to savor this moment. What good would it do to allow annoyance to interfere with gratitude?

Not a day goes by that I don't still need to remind myself that my life is not just what's handed to me, nor is it my list of obligations, my accomplishments or failures, or what my family is up to, but rather it is what I choose, day in and day out, to make of it all. When I am able simply to be with things as they are, able to accept the day's challenges without judging, reaching, or wishing for something else, I feel as if I am receiving the privilege, coming a step closer to being myself. It's when I get lost in the day's details, or so caught up in worries about what might be, that I miss the beauty of what is.

Meaning and purpose come not from accomplishing great things in the world, but simply from loving those who are right in front of you, doing all you can with what you have, in the time you have, in the place where you are.

...there is no such thing as a charmed life, not for any of us, no matter where we live or how mindfully we attend to the tasks at hand. But there are charmed moments, all the time, in every life and in every day, if we are only awake enough to experience them when they come and wise enough to appreciate them.

Now I see that the journey was never meant to lead to some new and improved version of me; that it has always been about coming home to who I already am.

we can learn to trust our maternal selves and to have faith in the innate goodness and purity of our children - even when we feel overwhelmed and the kids are pushing all our buttons. we can support one another....we can be understanding of each other and easier on ourselves.

I want to hold on tight to everything and everyone I cherished and, at the same time, saw in a way I never had before that living on this earth, growing older, and growing up in the true sense of the word is really about learning how to let go.

At times, my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be--for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past--is nearly overwhelming.

Magic wasn't something I had to go in search of; it was here, within me, all the time. When hearts are open, when love is flowing, magic happens.

Life feels precious. It is.

Perhaps the real point of life is simply to wear us down until we have no choice but to start abandoning our defenses. We learn that the way things are is simply the way they are meant to be right now, and then, suddenly, at long last, we catch a glimpse of the abundance in the moment--abundance even in the face of things falling apart.

It's easy, given the times we live in and the implicit messages we absorb each day, to equeate a good life with having a lot and doing a lot. So it's also easy to fall into believing that our children, if they are to succeed in life, need to be terrific at everything, and that it's up to us to make sure that they are-to keep them on track through tougher course loads, more activities, more competitive sports, more summer programs. But in all our well-intentioned efforts to do the right thing for our children, we may be failing to provide them with something that is truly essential-the time and space they need to wake up to themselves, to grow acquainted with their own innate gifts, to dream their dreams and discover their true natures.

When we focus on what is good and beautiful in someone, whether or not we think that they “deserve” it, the good and the beautiful are strengthened merely by the light of our attention.

A balanced life has a rhythym. But we live in a time, and in a culture, that encourages everyone to just move faster. I'm learning that if I don't take the time to tune in to my own more deliberate pace, I end up moving to someone else's, the speed of events around me setting a tempo that leaves me feeling scattered and out of touch with myself. I know now that I can't write fast; that words, my own thoughts and ideas, come to the surface slowly and in silence. A close relationship with myself requires slowness. Intimacy with my husband and guarded teenage sons requires slowness. A good conversation can't be hurried, it needs time in which to meander its way to revelation and insight. Even cooking dinner with care and attention is slow work. A thoughtful life is not rushed.

I know I can't make time slow down, can't hold our life as it is in a freeze frame or slow my children's inexorable journeys into adulthood and lives of their own. But I can celebrate those journeys by bearing witness to them, by paying attention, and, perhaps most of all, by carrying on with my own growth and becoming. Now it dawns on me that the only way I can figure out what I'm meant to be doing is to try to understand who I'm meant to be...I will not waste this life, not one hour, not one minute. I will not take for granted the blessing of our being here...I will give thanks...

This, I suspect, is the territory that lies just ahead and around the curve of today. A place where loss grows more familiar, where joy is harmonized by sorrow, where endings outnumber beginnings, and where kindness becomes a sacrament.

One of the greatest challenges I've faced as a mother-especially in these anxious, winner-takes-all times-is the need to resist the urge to accept someone else's definition of success and to try to figure out, instead, what really is best for my own children, what unique combination of structure and freedom, nurturing and challenge, education and exploration, each of them needs in order to grow and bloom.

Growth and transformation occur not by changing who we are, but as we summon the courage to be who we are.

Reading, reading actively, strengthens the soul.

If some essential part of me was already disappearing as my children moved into increasingly wider orbits, well then, I wanted to rech out and claim something else to take its place.

One thing we've learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than "home" is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred.

...home is less a location than a discipline. It is a way of being, a domestic, considered attention to familiar routines and the small, essential details of everyday life. From now on, I promised myself, home would be wherever I was, not the place that I one day hoped it to be. I would create it by being present. I would try to do better.

If you want to be reborn,' it is written in the Tao Te Ching, 'let yourself die.' This is what I've been having trouble with, the fact that letting go can feel, at times, like a death. Someday, I know, I will lose everything. All the small deaths along the way are practice runs for the big ones, asking us to learn to be present, to grow in faith, to be grateful for what is. Life is finite and short. But this new task, figuring out how to let go of so much that has been precious -- my children, my youth, my life as I know it -- can feel like a bitter foretaste of other losses yet to come.

I don't wish for the red house back, not really, yet in a way, I wish for everything back that ever was, everything that once seemed like forever and yet has vanished . . . Standing here on an empty hilltop in New Hampshire, as a bulldozer slowly pushes the debris of a small red house into a neat pile, I allow, just for a moment, the past to push hard against the walls of my heart. Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we've loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, is already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings.

Perhaps it's human nature: We want to shield our children from pain, and what we get instead is life and heartache and lessons that bring us to our knees. Sooner or later we are handed the brute, necessary curriculum of surrender, we have no choice, then but to bow our heads and learn. We struggle to accept that our children's destinies are not ours to write, their battles not ours to fight, their bruises not ours to bear, nor their victories ours to take credit for. We learn humility and how to ask for help. We learn to let go even when every fiber of our being yearns to hold on even tighter.

When we focus on what is good and beautiful in someone, whether or not we think that they "deserve" it, the good and beautiful are strengthened merely by the light of our attention. When we choose to see and appreciate what is good and beautiful in our children, that goodness can't help but grow, and their beauty blossoms forth.

Stay focused on what is beautiful and abundant even as illness carves more and more of what you love away

Home was this whole perfectly contained universe--town, friends, acquaintances, the streets we traveled every day...And we were about to leave it all.

slight shifts in imagination can have deeper and more lasting impact on our lives than major efforts at change.

When we focus on what is good and beautiful in someone, whether or not we think that they 'deserve' it, the good and the beautiful are strengthened merely by the light of our attention.

Perhaps it's human nature: We want to shield our children from pain, and what we get instead is life and heartache and lessons that bring us to our knees. Sooner or later we are handed the brute, necessary curriculum of surrender, we have no choice, then but to bow our heads and learn. We struggle to accept that our children's destinies are not ours to write, their battles not ours to fight, their bruises not ours to bear, nor their victories ours to take credit for. We learn humility and how to ask for help. We learn to let go even when every fiber of our being yearns to hold on even tighter.

Many of us attend a few yoga classes and find that we like the glimpse of another way of life that yoga offers. We are delighted by the way we feel after class and we are pleasantly surprised as certain behaviors start to fall away. Perhaps we no longer need coffee in the morning; or staying out late at night becomes less attractive; or we find ourselves calmer and more compassionate. Suddenly we're convinced that we've hit upon a painless way to solve all our problems. Sadly, this is not the case. Practice is not a substitute for the difficult work of renunciation. The postures and breath work that you do in a typical yoga class will change your life. These practices—asana and pranayama—suffuse us with the energy we need to take on the hard choices and to endure the inevitable highs and lows. What yoga practice will not do, however, is take the place of the hard lessons each of us has to learn in order to mature spiritually.

Losing this part of my life, this time of being a mother to growing children, is indeed an ending. For months, I've carried that quiet sorrow, getting used to its heaviness, the way one learns to live with the chronic soreness of a joint, a tenderness in wrist or knee. What I long to do now is to let the sadness go as well, to have faith that even as my sons graduate from high school and leave home, and this phase of our family life draws to a close, there will be new beginnings not just for them, but for all of us.

I take the seashell from my jeans pocket and rub my fingers across its silken, indented surface, shallow as my own open hand. This chalice, subtly shaped by some divine intelligence to allow water to flow in and out with ease, is what I aspire to become: a vessel through which feelings can pour in and spill right out again, without all the grasping and holding that obstructs the flow. Can I be as serene and simple as this bleached shell, rubbed smooth by wind and water, receiving and releasing, filling and emptying and filling again, eternally receptive to the currents of life?

When the Going Gets Tough… When the going gets tough may I resist my first impulse to wade in, fix, explain, resolve, and restore. May I sit down instead. When the going gets tough may I be quiet. May I steep for a while in stillness. When the going gets tough may I have faith that things are unfolding as they are meant to. May I remember that my life is what it is, not what I ask for. May I find the strength to bear it, the grace to accept it, the faith to embrace it. When the going gets tough may I practice with what I’m given, rather than wish for something else. When the going gets tough may I assume nothing. May I not take it personally. May I opt for trust over doubt, compassion over suspicion, vulnerability over vengeance. When the going gets tough may I open my heart before I open my mouth. When the going gets tough may I be the first to apologize. May I leave it at that. May I bend with all my being toward forgiveness. When the going gets tough may I look for a door to step through rather than a wall to hide behind. When the going gets tough may I turn my gaze up to the sky above my head, rather than down to the mess at my feet. May I count my blessings. When the going gets tough may I pause, reach out a hand, and make the way easier for someone else. When the going gets tough may I remember that I’m not alone. May I be kind. When the going gets tough may I choose love over fear. Every time.

Moment by moment we have the opportunity to say yes, to move into our lives and open ourselves to the adventure...

clearly, I am going to need a lot more practice—practice in being present, practice in feeling my feelings and in letting them go, practice in loving, in accepting, and especially practice in holding those most dear to me with a lighter touch. At least I have learned this: It all is a practice. I just have to show up and keep on practicing. Breathe. Relax. Feel. Watch. Allow.

I was struck by the realization that this time of all four of us living together under one roof is really just a single chapter in our family narrative, not the whole story after all, and that each day brings us inexorably closer to the final page.

Letting go, living with less, expecting less, we experienced abundance. And therein lay the paradox.

How little I knew of such things on that day eighteen years ago when I gave birth to my first child and, at the same moment, to myself as a mother. How surprised I would have been then, to think that the birthing would continue for both of us, that the journey of the spirit was only just beginning, and that the long, hard labor I’d just endured was not an ending, but an initiation into much greater tests to come.

it probably has less to do with where I live than with how I choose to live.

Their lives have not contracted, their hearts have not narrowed, they’ve expanded.

The rewards of learning to live into the present moment, rather than always worrying about a future that no one could predict anyway.

in our fast-moving, noisy world, less can be more, silence is precious, and in our daily rush through life, we often sacrifice the very things we need the most—quiet, awareness, patience, joy.

Growing up in the true sense, I was coming to see, involves more than just keeping all the balls in the air, juggling the responsibilities and details of life as they came at me. It also means understanding that every choice we make gives shape and meaning to the life that is uniquely ours to lead, just as a sculptor’s chisel enlivens and shapes, with each tiny stroke, the stone beneath his hands.

the answers to the really big questions, the answers we most hunger for, don’t ever come to us from the outside; rather, they come from a quiet place within.

But the memories I find myself sifting through the past to find, the ones that I would now give anything to relive, are the ones that no one ever thought to photograph, the ones that came and went as softly as a breeze on a summer afternoon.

the most wonderful gift we had, the gift I’ve finally learned to cherish above all else, was the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.

If motherhood has taught me anything, it is that I cannot change my children, I can only change myself. Try as I might, I can’t shape either one of them to my desires or designs, but I can choose, moment by moment and day by day, my own reaction to who they are.

And it will be enough if I can begin to learn the art of letting go by practicing it in the present, brooding less about what could happen and paying close, grateful attention instead to the small pleasures of our life together now:

I realize that I know something of who he was, and who he is in this moment, but nothing at all of who or what he might yet become.

We try so hard to prepare our children to go forth and meet the world, even as we try, perhaps in vain, to prepare ourselves to release them to their destinies. Then the time arrives, and no one feels quite ready.

Giving in to fear—fear that can easily come to permeate every aspect of our existence—we close down to gratitude. We lose our ability to appreciate life’s small gifts in all their form.

Life is precious, I want to tell him, and every hour of time that you spend now thinking about how you want to live your own is worth the effort. How strange it feels, this weighty mixture of pride and sadness, yet I suspect both will grow familiar in the months ahead. Already, my heart is stretching. Already, I’ve begun the long, wrenching work of this good-bye.

pause and reflect on your lives, to attend to ordinary moments as if they mattered, and to come up with some questions of your own. For one thing we’ve realized is that sometimes the questions themselves are more valuable than the answers, which are always changing anyway. —Katrina Kenison

the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet and learn to be at home.

A place, too, where I might begin to write a story of midlife longings and discoveries, of lessons learned in the search for home and a new sense of purpose, and the bittersweet intensity of life with teenagers—holding on, letting go.

So it comes back, as it so often does these days, to my own fear and anxiety as opposed to my son’s increasingly self-aware perceptions about who he is and what he should be doing. If I can give up my agenda, if I can remember that my own hopes and dreams do not belong on his shoulders, then perhaps I really can offer him the kind of support he needs. And if I can let go of my own idea of what success might look like for him, then I can encourage him, instead, to discover and treasure in himself what is unique and internal and truly valuable.

every moment of our togetherness contains the seed of a farewell, that life is always a dance of coming together and moving away again. Somehow we must learn to be nimble in our steps, to welcome both togetherness and solitude, to move boldly, easily, out into the world, and to honor as well the soul’s requirements for rest, replenishment, and reflection.

The secret of contentment, as I’ve come at last to know, is not in getting what I want. It’s not about being in the perfect place or having just the right sort of life. Contentment and grace may just be two sides of the same coin. And they are both mine whenever I remember to stop, look around, and appreciate where I already am and what I already have.

Grown children do come home again, of course, but never again do they live with us under quite the same circumstances or allow themselves to be parented on quite the same terms.

Losing this part of my life, this time of being a mother to growing children, is indeed an ending. For months, I’ve carried that quiet sorrow, getting used to its heaviness,

We create our own happiness by choosing it, even as the very things we hold most dear change and transform before our eyes. Today is unfurling, already slipping away, with nothing at all to make it memorable or special.

The best days, sometimes, are the days when nothing happens to ripple the calm surface of life. No big surprises, no great ups or downs, no regrets. Instead, time just to notice what is.

all of us, really, to confront reality, to accept that rejection and dashed hopes are always going to be part of the picture, no matter how much our hearts may desire a particular outcome?

Here, in the crucible of everyday life, it seems that we are all being tested.

But what is surprising, according to Cope, is that our gift is often paired with a wound. In other words, our strength seems to be born of our suffering, growing and flowering out of our limitations.

It may be that choosing contentment is just another aspect of growing and maturing, a way to begin reorienting life away from effort and desire toward noticing and appreciating instead.

the hardest part of letting go, at least for me, is not just about my grown children leaving home, emotional and momentous as that milestone will be. The real challenge is how to relinquish with serenity the role I’ve cherished for so long, to stop identifying myself so completely with motherhood and allow for a new, more mature self to be born.

in truth we possess none of these things, nor can we write any life story but our own.

I was suddenly overcome by awareness: of how precious and fragile life is, and how great my new responsibility, to keep this small, dependent being alive and safe through his long passage into adulthood. Now the time that always was the future has become the present.

I am called upon not only to let him go, but to relinquish as well any illusion I might have had about my ability to protect him. The truth is, we can’t keep our children safe, all we can do is love them, teach them as best we can, and then trust in their destinies as they embark on their own necessary journeys, out beyond the sheltered shores of childhood.

They don’t belong to us,” Joan says, a touch of wonder in her voice, as if trying to balance this sense of loss and blessing. “We are so lucky, really, to get to have our children with us for as long as we do. But we certainly don’t get to choose their destinies, and we can’t be holding on when all their life force is urging them to go.

The difficulty of the journey sometimes turns out to be its blessing.

How quickly we’ll go then from a life that is filled with children to one that is suddenly our own to shape. How strange it feels already, to realize that our sons’ complete dependency has evolved, right before our eyes, into a relentless, inexorable quest for freedom and autonomy.

part of me wishing that I could step right back into this chapter of my own life, do it all over again, and get it right this time.

Choosing one path always means rejecting others. In the end, all these choices, the big ones and countless little ones, add up just to this: a life in process, a work in progress.

The answer to all your questions,” he said, “is yes.” There was a ripple of nervous laughter as he continued, “Your son or daughter does belong here. You have done your part. And now it is your job to go home, and allow these young men and women to be college students. I know from experience with my own children that no one ever feels quite ready to be a parent in an empty nest. The only way to learn how, is to do it.

how grateful we are, not only for this moment, but for the millions of moments that preceded it as well, moments that have somehow added up to this:

I know I can’t make time slow down, can’t hold our life as it is in a freeze frame or slow my children’s inexorable journeys into adulthood and lives of their own. But I can celebrate those journeys by bearing witness to them, by paying attention, and, perhaps most of all, by carrying on with my own growth and becoming.

It would be so easy to forget to love this life, to just go through the motions, doing what needs to be done, as if it’s all going to last forever.

the past is nothing more than an infinity of moments, all come and gone in the blink of an eye.

The life we have right here, right now, is the best life there is.

My challenge is to hold on to that awareness, even on days when everyone’s stress runs high, when one or the other of my children needs more than I can give, or when I’m simply overwhelmed by the demands of life with adolescents or saddened by the idea of life without them.

Each step he takes on his own now is not just a separation from us and our ideas, but a move in the direction of his own life’s possibilities, part of the necessary, ongoing process of self-discovery that growing up is all about.

How I recognize the things in life that really matter and how well I manage to push aside the great swirling mass of fears and desires and aspirations that sometimes obscures my view of the beauty that’s right in front of me.

I can still get so enmeshed in the necessities and logistics of life that I miss the beauty. “We do not remember days, we remember moments,” the saying goes, and surely it is the moments, the small, fleeting details of us as we are right now, that I want to seize and capture. If memory is the art of attention, then pausing to be grateful is a way of remembering. And remembering is a way, perhaps the only way, of holding on to the way we are now, the things I love, the moments I wish never to lose.

I must remind myself these days that life is what it is, wonderful and heartrending all at once, and that my two children are doing exactly what they should be doing—rebelling and leaving.

There was no escaping the emotion of that day, the realization that this really was it, the moment when our life paths would diverge for the first time.

What I remember most about that day is just how intensely all my deepest fears for this boy of ours collided with all my dearest hopes for him. Had we done a good enough job preparing him for what lay ahead? Was he smart enough, good enough, mature enough, to be here? Would he be happy?

We are just a family gathering around a table for a few minutes at the end of a day. But the scene itself feels hallowed, sacred, as if my own awareness has suddenly illuminated us all with a shaft of holy light.

there is no such thing as a charmed life, not for any of us, no matter where we live or how mindfully we attend to the tasks at hand. But there are charmed moments, all the time, in every life and in every day, if we are only awake enough to experience them when they come and wise enough to appreciate them.

Now, with that door closed, all the rest stand open. Someday, in the not too distant future, he will take his leave of us and walk through one of them. Already, I feel life speeding up, spinning on, and I worry that this year is passing us by, tipping us all too quickly into a future I’m still not ready to inhabit.

There are, I am beginning to see, many kinds of letting go. Not just of children and childhood rituals, but of old ideas about the way things ought to look or be or feel.

I succumb to unexpected longing. He is doing exactly what all eighteen-year-olds do, growing up. Separating. Looking forward, not back, as he prepares to embark on a life of his own. And even though he hasn’t left yet, I am missing him already.

what I feel is the opposite of loneliness, but rather a kind of deep acceptance, a sense of the intimacy and interconnectedness of all creation. Letting go, I am beginning to understand, is not just an idea or a gesture, but a kind of spiritual maturation, a movement away from the physical realm and into a place of greater faith and mystery.

letting go is also a way of saying, “I love you.

You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion.… Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.