Lots Of Struggle Quotes

One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.

One thing I have learnt is that you may do a lot of evil things, but if you are ever afforded a chance to be good, then you should take it. You will feel better about yourself.

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.

AI-powered passive monitoring is taking off and has huge advantages over the traditional way of monitoring patients. The advantage of passive monitoring, as opposed to data collected from wearables, is that it doesn’t require patients or seniors to actively wear a device at all times. Used in a hospital setting, the tech reduces healthcare workers’ risk of exposure to COVID-19 by limiting their contact with patients and automating data collection for vital signs. Also, camera-based monitoring is unpopular for the simple reason that a lot of people don’t like being watched by a camera.

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

God whispered, "You endured a lot. For that I am truly sorry, but grateful. I needed you to struggle to help so many. Through that process you would grow into who you have now become. Didn't you know that I gave all my struggles to my favorite children? One only needs to look at the struggles given to your older brother Jesus to know how important you have been to me.

There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.

Ask if you would like to,’ he said, smiling, ‘Or if you prefer, we could just sit.’    ‘But I guess you’re not just sitting.’   He smiled again. ‘No.’   ‘So … are you praying?’   ‘Yes. I try and pray a lot.’  ‘Can I pray?’  ‘Yes. Of course.’  ‘I think … maybe …’  ‘Yes?’  ‘You are praying that I might be able to pray. Because you know that I don’t know how to.’ ‘Yes, I am. And I believe you will be able to. There is something you need help with, and you will get that help.’  ‘So … is God there then?’  ‘Yes, God is there. God is here. Everywhere. He wants you to ask for help and He will give it. He wants you to know what to ask for. You can ask Him anything.’ ‘Anything?’   ‘Anything at all. Absolutely anything at all. He will give you strength and guidance and protect you from evil.’  Natasha sat very still and wiped away the tears. She wished she could believe it.

I picked up the mop and started washing again as Rob struggled to his feet, red faced. John laughed, and Much covered a smile. "You lot think this is funny?" I asked. "I'll unman you too if you wish it." They jumped back, and Rob grunted. "You haven't unmanned me, and I resent the implication of it." "It were a warning blow," I told him, shoving the mop 'cross the floor. "Next time I'll try harder.

You’re a lot of things, Nell Hawthorne. You’re complex. You’re cute. You’re lovely. You’re funny. You’re strong. You’re beautiful.” She seems to be struggling with words and emotions. I keep going. “You’re tortured. You’re hurting. You’re amazing. You’re talented. You’re sexy as fuck.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind and stupid. I am not a veteran, passing my legless, armless days in a wheelchair. I am not that mongoloidish old man shuffling out of the gates of the mental hospital. I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distaste at having to choose between alternatives. Perhaps that's why I want to be everyone - so no one can blame me for being I. So I won't have to take the responsibility for my own character development and philosophy. People are happy - - - if that means being content with your lot: feeling comfortable as the complacent round peg struggling in a round hole, with no awkward or painful edges - no space to wonder or question in. I am not content, because my lot is limiting, as are all others. People specialize; people become devoted to an idea; people "find themselves." But the very content that comes from finding yourself is overshadowed by the knowledge that by doing so you are admitting you are not only a grotesque, but a special kind of grotesque.

But I find the antidote to that is just keeping a sense of humor. And staying humble. And laughing a lot. And doubling down on smiling. We’re all just muddling through, after all. We’re all just doing the best we can. We’re all struggling with our struggles. Nobody has the answers. And everybody, deep down, is a little bit lost.

The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

Trying to love yourself, to know your own value and worth, is something I think a lot of young girls struggle with and that can definitely flow into adulthood. We all have things that set us apart, make us special, make us who we are, and I would love to see those things celebrated and enjoyed across the board. Let that freak flag fly! (Or whatever equivalent you have.)

No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps, and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.... That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

You look like you’re cycling through a lot of things right now.” “Like what?” “Like whether you should kiss me or punch me.” “It’s a daily struggle.

When you write, you believe in something no one else can see. You spend lots of time committed to a project for which there are no assurances, no guarantees. Being a writer subjects you to the same doubts, the same unpopularity, the same nagging questions that believers struggle with. Writing is communing with the unseen…

By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren't confrontations with God but with the difficulty--in my own mind, or in the human lot--of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed--into what, I had no idea.

That’s the funny thing,” she said. “Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.

Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.

She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, “we the people” originally left out a lot of people. “It would not include me,” RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.

One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about. We never needed best friend gear because I guess with real friends you don’t have to make it official. It just is.

The King emerged from the library, paperwork in hand, eyebrows furrowed. "Well, what is it, what is it?" he said crossly. "Can you not let me work for five minutes at a time?" The girls burst into angry cries. Kale let out another piercing shriek. "Him-him-him-" said Delphinium, pointing a shaking finger at Mr. Hyette, who laughed still. "He-he-him!" "He-he-he was spying on us!" "And we weren't even wearing our boots!" "Or even our stockings!" Thunpfwhap. The King threw Mr. Hyette up against the paneling. My Hyette's head slammed against the wainscot. Kale stopped midscream, hiccupped, and giggled. "Mr. Hyeete!" said the King. Mr. Hyette struggled against the King's steel grip. "Ow," he said. "I say, ow!" The King yanked Mr. Hyette from the wall and grabbed him by the scruff of his fluffy cravat. He handled Mr. Hyette out the entrance hall doors, slamming them behind him. Outside, gravel scuffled. "I say," said Bramble, in an impeccable impersonation of Mr. Hyette. "I say, I say! I say-this Royal Business could actually be quite a lot of fun!

There's a lot that is awful. That's the struggle of getting old. To make sure you don't let what's hard...obscure the beauty.

God's heart…is not that we escape our lot, but that we learn to thrive in the midst of it.

MAMA: You must not dislike people ’cause they well off, honey. BENEATHA: Why not? It makes just as much sense as disliking people ’cause they are poor, and lots of people do that.

No one wants to admit that they suffer from a mental illness, because of the stigma,” I said. “Both of us suffer from major depression. He knows that I’ve been through a lot of the same things that he’s going through now.

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers. And concerning the struggle of all against all: that is a myth.

I was taught that the world had a lot of problems; that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate; and that service is the rent each of us pays for living -- the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reached your personal goals.

The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care. I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.' I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research. Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be. Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others, of what we could pack into the stream of life? But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review we ask God’s forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken. On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives. In thinking about our day we may face indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don’t struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while. What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind. Being still inexperienced and having just made conscious contact with God, it is not probable that we are going to be inspired at all times. We might pay for this presumption in all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it. We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems. We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t work. You can easily see why.

Perhaps most important of all, and this is so central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal." Prisons are constituted as "normal." It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars, and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.

Look,' I said, struggling to keep up, 'I just wanna make one thing absolutely clear. I don't believe in guns. I just want peace. Okay?' Alessandro stopped in the middle of the corridor, took out the gun, and wrapped my hand around it before I realized what he was doing. 'Can you feel that? That's a gun. It exists. And there are a lot of people out there who do believe in it. So, excused me for taking care of them so you can have your peace.

We are not a voice for the voiceless. The truth is that there is a lot of noise out there drowning out quiet voices, and many people have stopped listening to the cries of their neighbors. Lots of folks have put their hands over their ears to drown out the suffering. Institutions have distanced themselves from the disturbing cries.. It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream, and struggle. One of the verses I have grown to love is the one where Jesus is preparing to leave the disciples and says, "I no longer call you servants.... Instead, I have called you friends" (John 15:15). Servanthood is a fine place to begin, but gradually we move toward mutual love, genuine relationships. Someday, perhaps we can even say those words that Ruth said to Naomi after years of partnership: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried" (Ruth 1:16-17).

After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.

The only problem was, the founders left a lot of people out of the Constitution. They left out poor people and black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. And it still goes on today.

the egalitarian lifestyles of hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her. This is invisible-hand egalitarianism.

Let's take this energy, this focus, this emotion you feel that's obviously negative and let's try to take it and move it somewhere else. Let's kinda aim it at something else. And so I look at art, I look at music, I look at writing and lyrics, I look at a concert, I look at those as moments where people can take the things that they're struggling with and really kind of unleash the and pour them out onto this thing. That's helped me, a lot.

It seems like you are used to blowing down my house of cards that I carefully built. I isolate myself and cried a lot of tears because of you. My heart has been battered and broken too many times because of you. Honestly, my self-esteem is shot down as low as I can go because of you.

It's easy to mistake being innocent for being simpleminded or naive. We all want to seem sophisticated; we all want to seem street-smart. To be innocent is to be "out of it." Yet there is a deep truth in innocence. A baby looks in his mother's eyes, and all he sees is love. As innocence fades away, more complicated things take its place. We think we need to outwit others and scheme to get what we want. We begin to spend a lot of energy protecting ourselves. Then life turns into a struggle. People have no choice but to be street-smart. How else can they survive? When you get right down to it, survival means seeing things the way they really are and responding. It means being open. And that's what innocence is. It's simple and trusting like a child, not judgmental and committed to one narrow point of view. If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never fades.

I’M SORRY. I HAVE BEEN VERY LONELY AND STRUGGLED WITH A LOT OF THINGS. NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE FEELINGS I’VE HAD. NO ONE IS ON MY SIDE. IT’S LIKE I’M COMPLETELY ALONE. I REALIZE THIS IS THE COWARDLY WAY OUT BUT I CAN’T STOP MYSELF FROM BEING A COWARD. MY WHOLE LIFE IS LIKE A BAD DREAM. THE KIND OF DREAM YOU DON’T WAKE UP FROM. PAIGE

There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly...survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful...

As women, we have come a long way but the struggle is real and our hunger is stirring up the right to be treated equally regardless of age, religion, race, and or which “group” we belong to. There is so much more that needs to be done but if we continue to come together as women instead of being each other’s enemies, filled with the rage of envy and competition, we will be able to move further along a lot faster than expected.

The scientific research is very clear that experiencing trauma without control can be debilitating. But I also worry about people who cruise through life, friction-free, for a long, long time before encountering their first real failure. They have so little practice falling and getting up again. They have so many reasons to stick with a fixed mindset. I see a lot of invisibly vulnerable high-achievers stumble in young adulthood and struggle to get up again. I call them the “fragile perfects.” Sometimes I meet fragile perfects in my office after a midterm or a final. Very quickly, it becomes clear that these bright and wonderful people know how to succeed but not how to fail.

It's a book that is set over 160 year ago. A lot has changed. A lot hasn't. We are only just beginning to appreciate exactly how a person's powerlessness may lead to struggles with their mental health. With our understanding, statics showing higher rates of mental illness in women, people of color and other disenfranchised groups become translated into truth. NOT a biological deficiency as doctors first thought. But a cultural creation that, if wanted to, we could do something about.

There was just Mavis and me, but it never seemed lonely because we never stopped talking. I could have an argument, in earnest, about who was the best “Kid” in the Hall, without having to explain who they were. One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about. We never needed best friend gear because I guess with real friends you don’t have to make it official. It just is.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind and stupid. I am not a veteran, passing my legless, armless days in a wheelchair. I am not that mongoloidish old man shuffling out of the gates of the mental hospital. I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distaste at having to choose between alternatives. Perhaps that's why I want to be everyone - so no one can blame me for being I. So I won't have to take the responsibility for my own character development and philosophy. People are happy - - - if that means being content with your lot: feeling comfortable as the complacent round peg struggling in a round hole, with no awkward or painful edges - no space to wonder or question in. I am not content, because my lot is limiting, as are all others. People specialize; people become devoted to an idea; people "find themselves.

Where is the dog tag you found?” “What?” Shelton yipped. “We…lost it.” “Where?” “In the woods. After we ran.” “Where in the woods? Ran from what?” “Oh, uh…Tory dropped the tag when we ran from…whatever.” “From whatever?” Hi hammered. “Did you see men with guns or not?” “Um, no. I guess not.” “You guess?” “It was dark.” Shelton struggled. “I realize now that nobody was there.” “Then what did you hear?” “Uh, er…pops. Like sticks breaking?” Shelton’s responses were growing increasingly feeble. “How many? From which direction?” “Lots. Like, from everywhere.” Hi’s eyebrows shot up. “You heard ‘lots’ of ‘pops like sticks’ coming from everywhere? That’s your story?” “Wait, no, not everywhere. From the…left?

But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.

The people at home,” I said. “A lot of them call me an apple.” Do they think you’re a fruit or something?” he asked. No, no,” I said. “They call me an apple because they think I’m red on the outside and white on the inside.” Ah, so they think you’re a traitor.” Yep.” Well, life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.” Can you believe there is a kid who talks like that? Like he’s already a college professor impressed with the sound of his own voice? Gordy,” I said. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say to me.” Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.” So?” So, back in the day, weird people threatened the strength of the tribe. If you weren’t good for making food, shelter, or babies, then you were tossed out on your own.” But we’re not primitive like that anymore.” Oh, yes, we are. Weird people still get banished.” You mean weird people like me,” I said. And me,” Gordy said. All right, then,” I said. “So we have a tribe of two.” I had the sudden urge to hug Gordy, and he had the sudden urge to prevent me from hugging him. Don’t get sentimental,” he said. Yep, even the weird boys are afraid of their emotions.

I've been sitting here now, and do you know what I was saying to myself? If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment--still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all. However, by the age of thirty, I will probably drop the cup, even if I haven't emptied it, and walk away...I don't know where. But until my thirtieth year, I know this for certain, my youth will overcome everything--all disillusionment, all aversion to live. I've asked myself many times: is there such despair in the world as could overcome this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me, and have decided that apparently there is not--that is, once again, until my thirtieth year, after which I myself shall want no more, so it seems to me. Some snotty-nosed, consumptive moralists, poets especially, often call this thirst for life base. True, it's a feature of the Karamazovs, to some extent, this thirst for life despite all; it must be sitting in you too; but why is it base? There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet, Alyosha. I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one's heart, out of old habit...I want to go to Europe, Alyosha, I'll go straight from here. Of course I know that I will only be going to a graveyard, but to the most, the most previous graveyard, that's the thing! The precious dead lie there, each stone over them speaks of such ardent past life, of such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their science, that I--this I know beforehand--will fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them--being wholeheartedly convinced, at the same time, that it has all long been a graveyard and nothing more. And I will not weep from despair, but simply because I will be happy in my shed tears. I will be drunk with my own tenderness. Sticky spring leaves, the blue sky--I love them, that's all! Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength...

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Everything has changed and life has taken a turn for the worse. Side effects are making you sick. Sick of life. Sick of struggling. The side effects take a toll on you. You feel yourself trembling, and it is unbearable to breathe and think about what’s next. You begin to slip into the deep end and feel numb. Your thoughts drift as the side effects get closer and closer to the point that you want to give up. The more and more they pull you underneath you can’t help but think, I do not have any fight left in me. Wake-up call! You have a lot to lose. You have more fight in you than you ever knew. You didn’t give yourself the opportunity to love yourself. You didn’t give yourself the ability to live and love life. You have given so much to others. Imagine, if you gave to yourself what you’ve given to others, what life would be like. Do not get lost in the deep end. You have to live for the now. Believe it or not, everything will fall into place. It doesn’t look like it at the moment, but better days lie ahead.

I actually think a lot of this has to do with the way that we label mental illness. ‘You are depressed’, ‘You are anorexic’, ‘You are Borderline’. You don’t turn around to someone with cancer and say ‘You are cancer’, or to someone who has migraines and say ‘You are a headache’. Is it any wonder that people who are experiencing mental illness struggle to understand the difference between this issue they are up against and who they are as a person?

Balance when establishing your career, in my view, is largely a myth. “Struggle porn” will tell you that you must be miserable before you can be successful. This isn’t true: you can experience a lot of reward along the way to success. But if balance is your priority in your youth, then you need to accept that, unless you are a genius, you may not reach the upper rungs of economic security.

Thinking of emoji as gestures helps put things into perspective if we're tempted to start thinking, "If words were good enough for Shakespeare, why aren't they good enough for us?" We can pause and realize that plain words weren't actually good enough for Shakespeare. A lot of what Shakespeare wrote was plays, designed not to be read on a page, but to be performed by people. How many of us have struggled through reading Shakespeare as a disembodied script in school, only to see him come to life in a well-acted production?

The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.

Hermione,’ said Hagrid. ‘What about her?’ said Ron. ‘She’s in a righ’ state, that’s what. She’s bin comin’ down ter visit me a lot since Chris’mas. Bin feelin’ lonely. Firs’ yeh weren’ talking to her because o’ the Firebolt, now yer not talkin’ to her because her cat—’ ‘—ate Scabbers!’ Ron interjected angrily. ‘Because her cat acted like all cats do,’ Hagrid continued doggedly. ‘She’s cried a fair few times, yeh know. Goin’ through a rough time at the moment. Bitten off more’n she can chew, if yeh ask me, all the work she’s tryin’ ter do. Still found time ter help me with Buckbeak’s case, mind.… She’s found some really good stuff fer me…reckon he’ll stand a good chance now…’ ‘Hagrid, we should've helped as well—sorry—’ Harry began awkwardly. ‘I’m not blamin’ yeh!’ said Hagrid, waving Harry’s apology aside. ‘Gawd knows yeh’ve had enough ter be gettin’ on with. I’ve seen yeh practicin’ Quidditch ev’ry hour o’ the day an’ night—but I gotta tell yeh, I thought you two’d value yer friend more’n broomsticks or rats. Tha’s all.’ Harry and Ron exchanged uncomfortable looks. ‘Really upset, she was, when Black nearly stabbed yeh, Ron. She’s got her heart in the right place, Hermione has, an’ you two not talkin’ to her—

Although I had once pinned all my hopes on putting myself through school, believing I could thereby make something of myself, I now realized the futility of this all too clearly. No amount of struggling for an education is going to help one get ahead in this world. And what does it mean to get ahead anyway? is there any more worthless lot than the so-called great people of this world? What is so admirable about being looked up to by others? I do not live for other. What I had to achieve was my own freedom, my own satisfaction. I had to be myself.

For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

To say mental struggles are her fault is no different than victim blaming. I understand your issues, and the feelings of abandonment you must’ve had, but you also need to understand that she would’ve stopped it if she could. That, deep down, she was fighting her demons to be able to go back to you, and she eventually succeeded. That’s the part you should celebrate, because it takes a lot of willpower, energy, and strength to fight one’s demons.

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould. But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there — ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions — that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered. Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives. […] I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown. Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown. You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won’t know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete. This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing.

if we don’t build a sturdy foundation with our kids—one based in trust, understanding, and curiosity—then we have nothing keeping them attached to us. I think about the term “connection capital” a lot. It refers to the reserve of positive feelings we hopefully build up with our children, which we can pull from in times of struggle or when the relationship between us gets strained. If we don’t build this up during our children’s earlier years, well, we have nothing to draw on when our kids are adolescents and young adults

The place where french-postmodernism has been really harmful is the Third World. Because Third World intellectuals are badly needed in popular movements, they can make contributions. And a lot of them is drawn away from this: antropologists, sociologists and others. They are drawn away in this arcane, and in my view, mostly meaningless discourses and are disassociated from popular struggles. And you can see the impact. They really indicate that the level of irrationality that grows out of this undermines the oportunities for doing something really significant and important. It is like consumerism because it diverts people from concentrating in a serious way and doing something about their own problems.

I've been meaning to ask," said Magnus. "When Shinyun and I were fighting in the pentagram in Rome, you shot her. You told me that you could see dozens of illusions of me fighting dozens of her. How did you know which one was really her?" "I didn't," said Alec. "I knew which one was you." "Oh. Was one version of me more handsome than the others?" Magnus said, charmed. "More debonair? Possessed a certain je ne sais quoi?" "I don't know about that," said Alec. "You reached for a knife. You had it in your grasp, and then you let it go." Magnus deflated. "You knew it was me because I'm worse at fighting than she is?" Magnus asked. "Well, that's terrible news. I imagine 'pathetic in combat' is on the top ten list of Shadowhutner turnoffs." "No," said Alec. "Number eleven, just below 'doesn't actually look good in black'?" Alec shook his head again. "Before we were together," he said, "I was angry a lot, and I hurt people because I was in pain. Being kind when you're in pain - it's hard. Most people struggle to do it at the best of times. The demon who cast that spell couldn't imagine it. But among all those identical figures, there was one person who hesitated to hurt somebody, even at the moment of utmost horror. That had to be you.

Suddenly William loomed over him, scowling, snarling and bloody, his suit dirt-stained and ripped. “Do you know. How many strands. Of hair I lost. On my way down?” Whatever. “Math was never my thing, but I’m gonna say you lost…a lot.” Electric-blues glittered with menace. “You are a cruel, sadistic bastard. My hair needs TLC and you…you… Damn you! I’ve gutted men for less.” “I know. I’ve watched you.” Paris lumbered to his feet and scanned the rocky bank they stood upon, the crimson ocean lapping and bubbling in every direction. The drawbridge was only a fifty-yard dash away. “Don’t kill the messenger, but I’m thinking you should change your dating profile to balding.” Masculine cheeks went scarlet as the big bad warrior struggled for a comeback. … “One of these days you’re going to wake up,” William finally said, “and I will have shaved you. Everywhere.” “Won’t make a difference. Women will still want me. But you know what else? What I did to you wasn’t cruel, Willy.” He offered the warrior a white-flag grin. A trick. A lie. “This, however, is.” He grabbed William by the wrist, swung the man around and around before at last releasing him and hurling his body directly onto the bridge.

I’m not sure what to say about struggle except that it feels like a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end. You never notice until it’s over the ways it has changed you, and there is no going back. We struggled a lot this year. For everyone who picked a fight with life and got the shit kicked out of them: I’m proud of you for surviving. This year I learned that cities are beautiful from rooftops even when you’re sad and that swimming in rivers while the sun sets in July will make you feel hopeful, no matter what’s going on at home. I found out my best friend is strong enough to swing me over his shoulder like I’m weightless and run down the street while I’m squealing and kicking against his chest. I found out vegan rice milk whipped cream is delicious, especially when it’s licked off the stomach of a boy you love. This year I kissed too many people with broken hearts and hands like mousetraps. If I could go back and unhurt them I would. If I could go back even farther and never meet them I would do that too. I turned 21. There’s no getting around it. I’m an adult now. Navigating the world has proved harder than I expected. There were times I was reckless. In my struggle to survive I hurt others. Apologies do not make good bandages. I’m not sure what to say about change except that it reminds me of the Bible story with the lions’ den. But you are not named Daniel and you have not been praying, so God lets the beasts get a few deep, painful swipes at you before the morning comes and you’re pulled into the light, exhausted and cut to shit. The good news is you survived. The bad news is you’re hurt and no one can heal you but yourself. You just have to find a stiff drink and a clean needle before you bleed out. And then you get up. And start over.

A lot can be changed in a span of a year. A thousand lives can be moulded, a lot many lessons can be learnt and life can show its unpredictability. Even so, one year is enough to prove to yourself that you are worth the struggle that you undertake just to reap a momentary fruit of that labour. If fighting a new fight keeps us motivated each year, so be it. Here is wishing every fighter, struggling to make a break and succeed in life a memorable New Year. Do what you do best and don't trade your passion for fame but rather earn the fame through your passion. May your fight be fruitful this year and your name engraved in hearts of horde in the form of your work. A Happy New Year to all my well wishers, peers, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and readers. May your year be blessed with good fortune and health with added wealth. My message this New Year is that in a world full of possibilities never limit yourself to the sky for what is sky when there is endless darkness beyond to lighten up. Take care.

The Delores tank rolled on inexorably, “You get a mortgage to buy a house, a larger mortgage than the previous owner because the price of the house has been artificially increased by the market, which is controlled by the banks. Then you live in the house for a few years paying a lot more in mortgage payments than you would if you were renting a similar property. But hey, you ‘own’ it and can ‘do things to it’… things that cost even more money, by the way… so you maintain its upkeep, improve it with say a new kitchen or bathroom; the more salubrious the neighbourhood the more expensive the kitchen would need to be – a Küche & Cucina, say; impressing your cleaner is very important after all and at the end you sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it so they’ll need an even bigger mortgage. And all the while everyone is paying all this money to the banks and the banks give the money to their shareholders, the biggest of whom are the incredibly rich. This, when you boil it all down, means that you’re taking a large sum out of your wages and passing it across to some rich person to live large, whilst you and others like you struggle to make their monthly payments. Basically you’ve been screwed, Doc, but somehow they’ve convinced you that you own a bit of England, when the truth is you don’t really own anything, you’re just renting it at a higher cost and they can take it back from you any time they want. It’s all just a card trick, Doc. All just ‘smoke and mirrors’ and that’s what’s getting to me.

Manhattan Community College had not one course on Peurto Rican history. The Peurto Rican sisters and brothers who knew what was happening became our teachers... once you understand something about the history of a people, their heroes, their hardships, and their sacrifices, it's easier to struggle with them. To support their struggle. For a lot of peole in this country, people who live in other places have no faces. And this is the way the U.S. government wants it to be. They figure as long as the people have no faces and the country has no form, amerikans will not protest when they send in the marines to wipe them out.

On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives. In thinking about our day we may face indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don’t struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while. What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind. Being still inexperienced and having just made conscious contact with God, it is not probable that we are going to be inspired at all times. We might pay for this presumption in all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it. We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems. We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t work. You can easily see why.

Why? So you can still qualify for assistance? Your family is gaming the system?" "No." Diana had always hated when people said this about her family. The bosses who made her dad list a payroll company as his employer, they gamed the system. The assholes who convinced her parents to take out both a second mortgage and a HELOC in 2006 gamed the system. The employers who would never give Edith enough hours for benefits gamed the system. But ask a lot of people, and they'd tell you it's people like her grandma who game the system. They'd tell you that an old woman who's worked hard every day of her life and still struggles to get by is a malignant vacuum for their personal tax dollars, and a blight on their lives as free Americans. "We're just trying to live.

[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don’t understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms—its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world—and channeled into infantile fantasies. “Big pharma is evil,” goes the line of reasoning; “therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism.” This is probably not helpful.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

The routine produces. But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave. I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going. And if somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it. http://is.gd/ouArv5

Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hour’s worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches. While not perfect, these assessments have been invaluable. (In fact, I have been adapting and refining them to help us in our recruiting and management.) The answers these shapers provided to the standardized questions gave me objective and statistically measurable evidence about their similarities and differences. It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.

The truth is that The Wild One -- despite an admittedly fictional treatment -- was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge, in the style of Time, it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film. It gave the outlaws a lasting, romance-glazed image of themselves, a coherent reflection that only a very few had been able to find in a mirror, and it quickly became the bike rider's answer to The Sun Also Rises. The image is not valid, but its wide acceptance can hardly be blamed on the movie. The Wild One was careful to distinguish between "good outlaws" and "bad outlaws," but the people who were most influenced chose to identify with Brando instead of Lee Marvin whose role as the villain was a lot more true to life than Brando's portrayal of the confused hero. They saw themselves as modern Robin Hoods ... virile, inarticulate brutes whose good instincts got warped somewhere in the struggle for self-expression and who spent the rest of their violent lives seeking revenge on a world that done them wrong when they were young and defenseless.

Artoo, I'm switching back to regular handwriting. Calligraphy is hard, and I didn't bring my good pens. Or I need more practice. Right now you're sitting across from me, probably writing HAGS 30 times in a row. I know a little bit of a lot of languages, but even so, I struggle to put this into words. Okay. I'm just going to do it. First of all, I need you to know I'm not putting this out there with any hope of reciprocation. This is something I have to get off my chest (cliché, sorry) before we go our separate ways (cliché). It's the last day of school, and therefore my last chance. "Crush" is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn't do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I'm crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I'm crushed when the day ends and I haven't said anything to you that isn't coated in five layers of sarcasm. I'm crushed, concluding this year without having known that you like melancholy music or eat cream cheese straight from the tub in the middle of the night or play with your bangs when you're nervous, as though you're worried they look bad. (They never do.) You're ambitious, clever, interesting, and beautiful. I put "beautiful" last because for some reason, I have a feeling you'd roll your eyes if I wrote it first. But you are. You're beautiful and adorable and so fucking charming. And you have this energy that radiates off you, a shimmering optimism I wish I could borrow for myself sometimes. You're looking at me like you can't believe I'm not done yet, so let me wrap this up before I turn it into a five-paragraph essay. But if this were an essay, here's the thesis statement: I'm in love with you, Rowan Roth. Please don't make too much fun of me at graduation? Yours, Neil P. McNair

Uncertainty and failure might look like the end of the road to you. But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn’t always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it’s like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day. Because this life is full of promise, always. It’s full of beads and dolls and chipped plates; it’s full of twinklings and twinges. It is possible to admit that life is a struggle and also embrace the fact that small things—like sons who call you and beloved dogs in framed pictures and birds that tell you to drink your fucking tea—matter. They matter a lot. Stop trying to make sense of things. You can’t think your way through this. Open your heart and drink in this glorious day. You are young, and you will find little things that will make you grateful to be alive. Believe in what you love now, with all of your heart, and you will love more and more until everything around you is love. Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is. Let’s celebrate this moment together. There are twinklings and twinges, right here, in this moment. It is enough. Let’s find the eastern towhee.

Not caring about our own pain and the pain of others is not working. How much longer are we willing to keep pulling drowning people out of the river one by one, rather than walking to the headwaters of the river to find the source of the pain? What will it take for us to let go of that earned self-righteousness and travel together to the cradle of the pain that is throwing all of us in at such a rate that we couldn’t possibly save everyone? Pain is unrelenting. It will get our attention. Despite our attempts to drown it in addiction, to physically beat it out of one another, to suffocate it with success and material trappings, or to strangle it with our hate, pain will find a way to make itself known. Pain will subside only when we acknowledge it and care for it. Addressing it with love and compassion would take only a minuscule percentage of the energy it takes to fight it, but approaching pain head-on is terrifying. Most of us were not taught how to recognize pain, name it, and be with it. Our families and culture believed that the vulnerability that it takes to acknowledge pain was weakness, so we were taught anger, rage, and denial instead. But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain. Sometimes owning our pain and bearing witness to struggle means getting angry. When we deny ourselves the right to be angry, we deny our pain. There are a lot of coded shame messages in the rhetoric of “Why so hostile?” “Don’t get hysterical,” “I’m sensing so much anger!” and “Don’t take it so personally.” All of these responses are normally code for Your emotion or opinion is making me uncomfortable or Suck it up and stay quiet. One response to this is “Get angry and stay angry!” I haven’t seen that advice borne out in the research. What I’ve found is that, yes, we all have the right and need to feel and own our anger. It’s an important human experience.

Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him--his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition--no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him--neither name nor money to bequeath--a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “To-morrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.

On the raptors kept for falconry: "They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember about their homes, about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they've learned and will learn. It is military conversation, really, like what you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song. Another subject they have is food. It is a depressing thought," he continued, "but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviar and gypsy music. Of course, they all come from noble blood." "What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and hungry." "Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being 'dedicated to their profession,' like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the member of the Muse [where Raptors are kept for falconry] is restricted to the Raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screened perches do not carry Blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as for the hungry part, they're far from starving or that kind of hunger: they're in training, you know! And like everybody in strict training, they think about food.

Yet she was so sweet. She wasn’t a hard-ass, wasn’t jaded after all that had been done to her. In bed, she was giving and generous. And she smiled a lot. She seemed to enjoy life. Whereas he’d been nothing but a giant pain in the ass, taking for granted everything that had been given to him. He’d had it so easy, while his parents had struggled to give him a good life so all he had to do was go out and live his dream. He and Savannah were as different as night and day. How could she tolerate being around him? He was nothing but a spoiled football player who craved the spotlight. He didn’t deserve to be sharing a bed with her. She needed someone who cared for her, who thought of nothing but her, who’d give up everything just to give her the kind of life she deserved. He sucked in a breath and realized it was time he made some serious life changes. It was time to go all in and stop hesitating about the things he really wanted in his career. In his life. It was time to start taking some chances.

Pessimism counterbalances the ridiculously optimistic expectations of the culture we live in and helps us adapt out of the deeply detached, unrealistic perspective that we likely formed as a young child. It reminds us that things won’t always go our way or always be that nice, but rather, things will go wrong a lot, and that, despite this, we can still be ok. Paradoxically, we must recognize that through a certain quality of pessimism, we can better assist a more reasonably optimistic experience of life. We are all struggling and improvising our way through this strange existence, constantly confused and unsure. No one is perfect or normal in any traditional sense. We all make mistakes big and small. No one knows who or why they are. Happiness is hard and unclear. There is greed, tragedy, and malevolence in this world that we have and will continue to experience. And at any moment, this whole world and all of humanity could end for any number of reasons. Yet despite everything that was just said prior, the thought of it all ending should and does make us sad and tremble with fear. We don’t want it to end. In spite of the chaos, uncertainties, and hardships, we want to go on. We want to endure. We want to see what we can do, overcome, and experience in the face of it all. In this, we find the hopeful spirit and strength of humankind. We find optimism in pessimism.

A SPOONFUL OF KINDNESS When Tommy, my son, was three years old, my wife, Lilly, and I took him for his annual checkup and the pediatrician asked us what his eating habits were like. “Well,” we confessed, “he’s going through this phase of only liking chicken fingers and carbs, so we’ve kind of given up trying to get him to eat vegetables for now. It’s become too much of a struggle every night.” The pediatrician nodded and smiled, and then said, “Well, you can’t really force him to eat the veggies, guys, but your job is to make sure they’re on his plate. He can’t eat them if they’re not even on his plate.” I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. I think about it with teaching. My students can’t learn what I don’t teach them. Kindness. Empathy. Compassion. It’s not part of the curriculum, I know, but I still have to keep dishing it out onto their plates every day. Maybe they’ll eat it; maybe they won’t. Either way, my job is to keep on serving it to them. Hopefully, a little mouthful of kindness today may make them hungry for a bigger taste of it tomorrow. —Mr. Browne

We need a stable government, fast!” I kept saying. “Elections are great in principle but this is no time for high ideals.” The president was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military training…he said to me, “This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don’t have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have…[struggling to remember]…all we have is what we want to be.” You see what he was saying. Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn’t strong enough to protect us from this crisis, then what future could it ever hope to have? He knew that America wanted a Caesar, but to be one would mean the end of America. They say great times make great men. I don’t buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. My boss was a great man. We were damn lucky to have him.

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are ‘still’ struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief. In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what? But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide. The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with little of its past glory remaining or appreciated. The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives. Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five. When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.

On the eleventh day, it finally stopped raining. Musashi chafed to be out in the open, but it was another week before they were able to return to work under a bright sun. The field they had so arduously carved out of the wilderness had disappeared without a trace; in its place were rocks, and a river where none had been before. The water seemed to mock them just as the villagers had. Iori, seeing no way to reclaim their loss, looked up and said, “This place is beyond hope. Let’s look for better land somewhere else.” “No,” Musashi said firmly. “With the water drained off, this would make excellent farmland. I examined the location from every angle before I chose it.” “What if we have another heavy rain?” “We’ll fix it so the water doesn’t come this way. We’ll lay a dam from here all the way to that hill over there.” ‘That’s an awful lot of work.” “You seem to forget that this is our dōjō. I’m not giving up a foot of this land until I see barley growing on it.” Musashi carried on his stubborn struggle throughout the winter, into the second month of the new year. It took several weeks of strenuous labor to dig ditches, drain the water off, pile dirt for a dike and then cover it with heavy rocks. Three weeks later everything was again washed away. “Look,” Iori said, “we’re wasting our energy on something impossible. Is that the Way of the Sword?” The question struck close to the bone, but Musashi would not give in. Only a month passed before the next disaster, a heavy snowfall followed by a quick thaw. Iori, on his return from trips to the temple for food, inevitably wore a long face, for the people there rode him mercilessly about Musashi’s failure. And finally Musashi himself began to lose heart. For two full days and on into a third, he sat silently brooding and staring at his field. Then it dawned on him suddenly. Unconsciously, he had been trying to create a neat, square field like those common in other parts of the Kanto Plain, but this was not what the terrain called for. Here, despite the general flatness, there were slight variations in the lay of the land and the quality of the soil that argued for an irregular shape. “What a fool I’ve been,” he exclaimed aloud. “I tried to make the water flow where I thought it should and force the dirt to stay where I thought it ought to be. But it didn’t work. How could it? Water’s water, dirt’s dirt. I can’t change their nature. What I’ve got to do is learn to be a servant to the water and a protector of the land.” In his own way, he had submitted to the attitude of the peasants. On that day he became nature’s manservant. He ceased trying to impose his will on nature and let nature lead the way, while at the same time seeking out possibilities beyond the grasp of other inhabitants of the plain. The snow came again, and another thaw; the muddy water oozed slowly over the plain. But Musashi had had time to work out his new approach, and his field remained intact. “The same rules must apply to governing people,” he said to himself. In his notebook, he wrote: “Do not attempt to oppose the way of the universe. But first make sure you know the way of the universe.

Once I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I began to view the world through two perspectives; I was starting to see death as both doctor and patient. As a doctor, I knew not to declare “Cancer is a battle I’m going to win!” or ask “Why me?” (Answer: Why not me?) I knew a lot about medical care, complications, and treatment algorithms. I quickly learned from my oncologist and my own study that stage IV lung cancer today was a disease whose story might be changing, like AIDS in the late 1980s: still a rapidly fatal illness but with emerging therapies that were, for the first time, providing years of life. While being trained as a physician and scientist had helped me process the data and accept the limits of what that data could reveal about my prognosis, it didn’t help me as a patient. It didn’t tell Lucy and me whether we should go ahead and have a child, or what it meant to nurture a new life while mine faded. Nor did it tell me whether to fight for my career, to reclaim the ambitions I had single-mindedly pursued for so long, but without the surety of the time to complete them. Like my own patients, I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living—and I needed Emma’s help to do so. Torn between being a doctor and being a patient, delving into medical science and turning back to literature for answers, I struggled, while facing my own death, to rebuild my old life—or perhaps find a new one. —

Artoo, I'm switching back to regular handwriting. Calligraphy is hard, and I didn't bring my good pens. Or I need more practice. Right now you're sitting across from me, probably writing HAGS 30 times in a row. I know a little bit of a lot of languages, but even so, I struggle to put this into words. Okay. I'm just going to do it. First of all, I need you to know I'm not putting this out there with any hope of reciprocation. This is something I have to get off my chest (cliché, sorry) before we go our separate ways (cliché). It's the last day of school, and therefore my last chance. "Crush" is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn't do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I'm crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I"m crushed when the day ends and I haven't said anything to you that isn't cloaked in five layers of sarcasm. I'm crushed, concluding this year without having known that you like melancholy music or eat cream cheese straight from the tub in the middle of the night or play with your bangs when you're nervous, as though you're worried they look bad. (They never do.) You're ambitious, clever, interesting, and beautiful. I put "beautiful" last because for some reason, I have a feeling you'd roll your eyes if I wrote it first. But you are. You're beautiful and adorable and so fucking charming. And you have this energy that radiates off you, a shimmering optimism I wish I could borrow for myself sometimes. You're looking at me like you can't believe I'm not done yet, so let me wrap this up before I turn it into a five-paragraph essay. But if it were an essay, here's the thesis statement. I am in love with you, Rowan Roth Please don't make too much fun of me at graduation? Yours, Neil P. McNair

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

have always been fascinated by relationships. I grew up in Britain, where my dad ran a pub, and I spent a lot of time watching people meeting, talking, drinking, brawling, dancing, flirting. But the focal point of my young life was my parents’ marriage. I watched helplessly as they destroyed their marriage and themselves. Still, I knew they loved each other deeply. In my father’s last days, he wept raw tears for my mother although they had been separated for more than twenty years. My response to my parents’ pain was to vow never to get married. Romantic love was, I decided, an illusion and a trap. I was better off on my own, free and unfettered. But then, of course, I fell in love and married. Love pulled me in even as I pushed it away. What was this mysterious and powerful emotion that defeated my parents, complicated my own life, and seemed to be the central source of joy and suffering for so many of us? Was there a way through the maze to enduring love? I followed my fascination with love and connection into counseling and psychology. As part of my training, I studied this drama as described by poets and scientists. I taught disturbed children who had been denied love. I counseled adults who struggled with the loss of love. I worked with families where family members loved each other, but could not come together and could not live apart. Love remained a mystery. Then, in the final phase of getting my doctorate in counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, I started to work with couples. I was instantly mesmerized by the intensity of their struggles and the way they often spoke of their relationships in terms of life and death.

I am a Roman,' he said to the king; 'my name is Gaius Mucius. I came here to kill you - my enemy. I have as much courage to die as to kill. It is our Roman way to do and to suffer bravely. Nor am I alone in my resolve against your life; behind me is a long line of men eager for the same honor. Brace yourself, if you will, for the struggle - a struggle for your life from hour to hour, with an armed enemy always at your door. That is the war we declare against you: you need fear no action in the battlefield, army against army; it will be fought against you alone, by one of us at a time.' Porsena in rage and alarm ordered the prisoner to be burnt alive unless he at once divulged the plot thus obscurely hinted at, whereupon Mucius, crying: 'See how cheap men hold their bodies when they care only for honor!' thrust his right hand into the fire which had been kindled for a sacrifice, and let it burn there as if he were unconscious of the pain. Porsena was so astonished by the young man's almost superhuman endurance that he leapt to his feet and ordered his guards to drag him from the altar. 'Go free,' he said; 'you have dared to be a worse enemy to yourself than to me. I should bless your courage, if it lay with my country to dispose of it. But, as that cannot be, I, as an honorable enemy, grant you pardon, life, and liberty.' 'Since you respect courage,' Mucius replied, as if he were thanking him for his generosity, 'I will tell you in gratitude what you could not force from me by threats. There are three hundred of us in Rome, all young like myself, and all of noble blood, who have sworn an attempt upon your life in this fashion. It was I who drew the first lot; the rest will follow, each in his turn and time, until fortune favor us and we have got you.' The release of Mucius (who was afterwards known as Scaevola, or the Left-Handed Man, from the loss of his right hand) was quickly followed by the arrival in Rome of envoys from Porsena. The first attempt upon his life, foiled only by a lucky mistake, and the prospect of having to face the same thing again from every one of the remaining conspirators, had so shaken the king that he was coming forward with proposals for peace.

Be honest with yourself. You were at your lowest and broken down. You were unsure and lost hope. You were hiding your fears until you showed them on your sleeve. You felt like everything and everyone was the hammer and you were the nail as they were beating down on you, and it was never-ending. Their empty threats had you scared and you were always running because your weakness was exposed. You were their prey. You didn’t know who to believe because of their mixed signals. You might not see it now, but you are stronger than you can ever imagine. You cannot become comfortable in your pain. You have to let the pain that you feel turn you into a rose without thorns. There are sixteen pieces on the chessboard. The king is the most important piece, but the difference is that the queen is the most powerful piece! You are a queen, you can maneuver around your opponents; they do not have the power over your life, your mind or soul. You might think you’ve been a prisoner, but that is your past’. Look in the now and work your way to how you want your future to be. Exercise your thoughts into a pattern of letting go, and think positively about more of what you want than what you do not want. Queen! You are a queen! As a matter of fact, you are the queen! Act as if you know it! You are powerful, determined, strong, and you can make the biggest and most extravagant move and put it into action. Lights, camera, strike a pose and own it! It is yours to own! Yes, you loved and loved so much. You also lost as well, but you lost hurt, pain, agony, and confusion. You’ve lost interest in wanting to know answers to unanswered questions. You’ve lost the willingness to give a shit about what others think. You’ve surrendered to being fine, that you cannot change the things you have no control over. You’ve lost a lot, but you’ve gained closure. You are now balanced, centered, focused, and filled with peace surrounding you in your heart, mind, body, and soul. Your pride was hurt, but you would rather walk alone and be more willing to give and learn more about the queen you are. You lost yourself in the process, but the more you learn about the new you, the more you will be so much in love with yourself. The more you learn about the new you, the more you will know your worth. The more you learn about the new you, the happier you are going to be, and this time around you will be smiling inside and out! The dots are now connecting. You feel alive! You know now that all is not lost. Now that you’ve cut the cord it is time to give your heart a second chance at loving yourself. Silence your mind. Take a deep breath and close your eyes. As you open your eyes, look at your reflection in the mirror. Aren’t you beautiful, Queen? Embrace who you are. Smile, laugh, welcome the new you and say, “My world is just now beginning.

Now come on, we’re off.” He marched out of the room. They heard the front door open, but Dudley did not move and after a few faltering steps Aunt Petunia stopped too. “What now?” barked Uncle Vernon, reappearing in the doorway. It seemed that Dudley was struggling with concepts too difficult to put into words. After several moments of apparently painful internal struggle he said, “But where’s he going to go?” Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon looked at each other. It was clear that Dudley was frightening them. Hestia Jones broke the silence. “But…surely you know where your nephew is going?” she asked, looking bewildered. “Certainly we know,” said Vernon Dursley. “He’s off with some of your lot, isn’t he? Right, Dudley, let’s get in the car, you heard the man, we’re in a hurry.” Again, Vernon Dursley marched as far as the front door, but Dudley did not follow. “Off with some of our lot?” Hestia looked outraged. Harry had met this attitude before: Witches and wizards seemed stunned that his closest living relatives took so little interest in the famous Harry Potter. “It’s fine,” Harry assured her. “It doesn’t matter, honestly.” “Doesn’t matter?” repeated Hestia, her voice rising ominously. “Don’t these people realize what you’ve been through? What danger you are in? The unique position you hold in the hearts of the anti-Voldemort movement?” “Er--no, they don’t,” said Harry. “They think I’m a waste of space, actually, but I’m used to--” “I don’t think you’re a waste of space.” If Harry had not seen Dudley’s lips move, he might not have believed it. As it was, he stared at Dudley for several seconds before accepting that it must have been his cousin who had spoken; for one thing, Dudley had turned red. Harry was embarrassed and astonished himself. “Well…er…thanks, Dudley.” Again, Dudley appeared to grapple with thoughts too unwieldy for expression before mumbling, “You saved my life.” “Not really,” said Harry. “It was your soul the dementor would have taken…” He looked curiously at his cousin. They had had virtually no contact during this summer or last, as Harry had come back to Privet Drive so briefly and kept to his room so much. It now dawned on Harry, however, that the cup of cold tea on which he had trodden that morning might not have been a booby trap at all. Although rather touched, he was nevertheless quite relieved that Dudley appeared to have exhausted his ability to express his feelings. After opening his mouth once or twice more, Dudley subsided into scarlet-faced silence. Aunt Petunia burst into tears. Hestia Jones gave her an approving look that changed to outrage as Aunt Petunia ran forward and embraced Dudley rather than Harry. “S-so sweet, Dudders…” she sobbed into his massive chest. “S-such a lovely b-boy…s-saying thank you…” “But he hasn’t said thank you at all!” said Hestia indignantly. “He only said he didn’t think Harry was a waste of space!” “Yeah, but coming from Dudley that’s like ‘I love you,’” said Harry, torn between annoyance and a desire to laugh as Aunt Petunia continued to clutch at Dudley as if he had just saved Harry from a burning building.

What did you think when I first told you about the animals I found?” He seemed confused. It obviously wasn’t what he’d expected. “Violet, I was seven years old. I thought it was badass. I think I was probably even jealous.” She made a face at him. “Didn’t you think it was creepy? Or that I was weird?” “Yeah,” he agreed enthusiastically. “That’s why I was so jealous. I wanted to be the one finding dead bodies. You were like an animal detective or something. You were only weird ‘cause you were a girl.” He grinned. “But I learned to overlook that since you always took me on such cool adventures.” Violet released a breath, smiling. She knew he was telling the truth, which only made it funnier to hear him saying the words out loud. Of course, what little boy didn’t want to go scavenging through the woods and digging in the dirt? She tried again. “Did you ever tell anyone? Does your mom know?” He lifted her hand to his mouth and rubbed her knuckles across his lower lip, his gaze locked with hers. “No,” he promised. “I swore I wouldn’t, not even her. I think she knows something, or at least she thinks you have the worst luck ever, since you found all those dead girls.” He lowered his voice. “She was really worried about you after the shooting last year. You’re like a daughter to her.” He leaned close. “Of course, that makes it kind of creepy when I do things like this.” He kissed her. It was intimate. Not soft or sweet this time, it was deep and passionate, stealing Violet’s breath. She laid her hand against his chest, savoring the feel of his heartbeat beneath her palm, and then traced her fingertips up to his neck, into his hair. He pulled her over the console that separated them, dragging her onto his lap. He ran his hands up her back restlessly, drawing her as close as he could. It was nearly impossible for her to pull herself away. “Wait,” she insisted breathlessly. “Please, wait.” She had her hands braced against his shoulders, struggling more against herself than him. His glazed eyes teased her. “I thought I was the one who was supposed to say no. I’m the girl, right?” She sighed heavily, leaning her head against his shoulder and trying to recapture her runaway thoughts. She still wanted to talk. She wanted the other things, too, but she needed to sort through her thoughts first. “Sorry, it’s just…I have a lot of…” She shrugged against him. His damp T-shirt was warm and practically paper-thin, tempting her to touch him. She ran her finger down the length of his stomach. She knew it wasn’t fair to tease him, but she couldn’t help herself. He was too enticing. “…I have some stuff I need to work through.” It was the best she could do for an explanation. He caught her hand before she’d reached his waistline, and he held it tightly in his grip. “I’m trying to be patient, Violet, I really am. If there’s something you want to tell me…Well, I just wish you’d trust me.” “I’ll get there,” she explained. “I’ll figure it all out. I’m just a little confused right now.” He let out a shaky breath and then he kissed the top of her head, still not releasing her hand. “So, when you do, we’ll pick up where we left off.” She nodded against him. She thought she would keep talking; she still had so many doubts about what she should, and shouldn’t, be doing. But instead she just stayed there, curled up on his lap, absorbing him, taking relief from his touch…and strength from his presence.