Regardless Of What Happens Quotes

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. We had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, and the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You can't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build your world from it.

Love is . . . Being happy for the other person when they are happy, Being sad for the person when they are sad, Being together in good times, And being together in bad times. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF STRENGTH. Love is . . . Being honest with yourself at all times, Being honest with the other person at all times, Telling, listening, respecting the truth, And never pretending. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF REALITY. Love is . . . An understanding so complete that you feel as if you are a part of the other person, Accepting the other person just the way they are, And not trying to change them to be something else. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF UNITY. Love is . . . The freedom to pursue your own desires while sharing your experiences with the other person, The growth of one individual alongside of and together with the growth of another individual. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SUCCESS. Love is . . . The excitement of planning things together, The excitement of doing things together. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF THE FUTURE. Love is . . . The fury of the storm, The calm in the rainbow. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF PASSION. Love is . . . Giving and taking in a daily situation, Being patient with each other's needs and desires. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SHARING. Love is . . . Knowing that the other person will always be with you regardless of what happens, Missing the other person when they are away but remaining near in heart at all times. LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SECURITY. LOVE IS . . . THE SOURCE OF LIFE!

I believe in you. In us. Regardless of what happens, you will always be the best partner I’ve ever had. You’ll always be the hardest working person I’ve ever known. There will only ever be you.

What I've started I must finish. I've gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward.

Is it dangerous to plan too much? Yes, we all need to plan, to have a plan, but life goes on regardless of our plans and we know only too well what happens to so many of the best laid plans of mice and men!

Acceptance means that you know, regardless of what happened, that there is something bigger than you at work. It also means you know that you are okay and that you will continue to be okay.

You must choose to be happy, grateful, and fulfilled. If you make that choice every single day, regardless of where you are or what’s happening, you will be happy.

It's nonsense to believe people go on loving each other regardless of what happens.

I believe that you're great, that there's something magnificent about you. Regardless of what has happened to you in your life, regardless of how young or how old you think you might be, the moment you begin to think properly, there's something that is within you, there's power within you, that's greater than the world. It will begin to emerge. It will take over your life. It will feed you. It will clothe you. It will guide you, protect you, direct you, sustain your very existence, if you let it. Now, that is what I know for sure.

It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.

I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life. I’ve learned that making a “living” is not the same thing as making a “life.” I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right- we had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, as well as the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it. So my true family was not just my mom, lost or found; my dad, gone from the start; and Cora, the only one who had really been there all along. It was Jamie, who took me in without question and gave me a future I once couldn't even imagine; Oliva, who did question, but also gave me answers; Harriet, who, like me, believed she needed no one and discovered otherwise. And then there was Nate. Nate, who was a friend to me before I even knew what a friend was. Who picked me up, literally, over and over again, and never asked for anything in return except for my word and my understanding. I'd given him one but not the other, because at the time I thought I couldn't, and then proved myself right by doing exactly as my mother had, hurting to prevent from being hurt myself. Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete- like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key. ~Ruby (pgs 400-401)

Moving doesn’t change who you are. It only changes the view outside your window. You must choose to be happy, grateful, and fulfilled. If you make that choice every single day, regardless of where you are or what’s happening, you will be happy.

I came to the realization that every moment exists in perpetuity regardless of whether it’s remembered. What has happened has happened; it occupies that moment in time forever. I was an eleven-year-old girl lying in the grass one summer. I knew in that moment that was true and recognized that I would blaze through moments for the rest of my life, forgetting things, and becoming ages older, until I forgot everything—so I consoled myself by committing to remember that one moment.

We never pray against our government or call down curses on them. Instead, we have learned that God is in control both of our own lives and the government we live under. God has used China's government for His own purposes, molding and shaping His children as He sees fit. Instead of focusing our prayers against any political system, we pray that regardless of what happens to us, we will be pleasing to God.

Regardless of what happens with the men, you’ll have a baby. An amazing little being who will blow your mind and expand your heart and make you think things you never thought and remember things you believed you forgot and heal things you imagined would never heal and forgive people you’ve begrudged for too long and understand things you didn’t understand before you fell madly in love with a tiny tyrant who doesn’t give a crap whether you need to pee. You will sing again if you stopped singing. You will dance again if you stopped dancing. You will crawl around on the floor and play chase and tickle and peek-a-boo. You’ll make towers of teetering blocks and snakes and rabbits with clay.

Say to yourself over and over again regardless of what happens: “God loves me!” And then add: “And I will try to love Him!

The things that are meant to be are the things we can’t control, the things we don’t cause, the things that happen regardless of who or what we are. Like sunsets and snow-fall and natural disasters. I’ve never believed hardship or suffering was meant to be.

There are two different kinds of people in the world. There are people who instinctively look for every chance to be a “victim” and those who look for every chance to rise above—regardless of where they are in life and what’s happening around them. There are people who realize their ability to create (greatly influence) reality toward a positive direction for themselves and those around them, and unfortunately those who use this power we all have for destructive purposes for themselves and others—many times without even knowing what they’re doing or the power they have inside themselves. We are all powerful individuals. Let’s use that power to create something beautiful!

People think that the word "class" involves the color black, wearing Chanel No. 5 and carrying a Louis Vuitton. The word "class" and "classy", to me, mean what happens when you are able to be thankful, able to give and be a true friend to anybody regardless of their background and where they come from. That's class. It's a beautiful wave that washes away faults and paints things in a graceful light. You can't always do this, though. Sometimes you just need to slap someone. Still, you can slap someone with a lot of poise and that makes all the difference.

Why bother taking notice of everything going on around you, filling up your mind with irrelevant details and excess information? What’s going to happen will happen regardless. Awareness is beside the point.

After we become a daughter, we become a wife to our husbands and a mother to our children. I believe that is why a woman smiles through the pain because she was always told what she couldn’t or shouldn’t do. Regardless of this, she believed in herself and made it happen.

Saying something is “meant to be” is a cop out. It’s a way for people to deal when they screw up or when life hands them a bowl of shit stew. The things that are meant to be are the things we can’t control, the things we don’t cause, the things that happen regardless of who or what we are. Like sunsets and snow-fall and natural disasters. I’ve never believed hardship or suffering was meant to be. I’ve never believed relationships were meant to be. We choose. In large part, we choose. We create, we make mistakes, we burn bridges, we build new ones.

When you really want something, and you couple that with an understanding of your nature, of your spiritual being, and the law that govern you, you will keep going, regardless of what's happened. Nothing will stop you.

Quote from Frontiers: "Regardless of what happened, it was definitely going to be an exciting time for everyone, the day humanity first reached out to touch the stars.

I believe in you. In us. Regardless of what happens, you will always be the best partner I’ve ever had.

You will grow and evolve because of your willingness to fail, to suck, to navigate murky waters, and to trust regardless of what happens.

A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening “outside,” just by changing the contents of consciousness. We all know individuals who can transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of their personalities. This ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks is the quality people most admire in others, and justly so; it is probably the most important trait not only for succeeding in life, but for enjoying it as well.

Love is not dependent on someone or something outside of you. One chooses to be Love in each moment as the moment unfolds, regardless of what happened in that moment.

When we live completely from the mind over a period of time, we lose touch with the infinite self, and then we begin to feel lost. This happens when we'are in doing mode all the time, rather than being . The latter means letting ourselves be who and what we are without judgment. Being doesn't mean that we don't do anything. It's just that our actions stem from following our emotions and feelings while staying present in the moment. Doing, on the other hand, is future focused, with the mind creating a series of tasks that take us from here to there in order to achieve a particular outcome, regardless of our current emotional state.

He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she did or said. She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked. If she was different with Connell, the difference was not happening inside herself, in her personhood, but in between them, in the dynamic.

Harmful, consensual sex happens and people should be allowed to speak freely using those terms. Those who have been harmed by sex deserve support regardless of whether they consented. Everyone should acknowledge the other side too, that we can hurt someone even if we did not mean to and even if we checked in and tried to do due diligence.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

I’m fifteen and I feel like girl my age are under a lot of pressure that boys are not under. I know I am smart, I know I am kind and funny, and I know that everyone around me keeps telling me that I can be whatever I want to be. I know all this but I just don’t feel that way. I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing. I hate that I feel like that because it makes me seem shallow, but I know all of my friends feel like that, and even my little sister. I feel like successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won’t be. What if my boobs don’t grow, what if I don’t have the perfect body, what if my hips don’t widen and give me a little waist, if none of that happens I feel like what’s the point of doing anything because I’ll just be the ‘fat ugly girl’ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not. I wish people would think about what pressure they are putting on everyone, not just teenage girls, but even older people – I watch my mum tear herself apart every day because her boobs are sagging and her skin is wrinkling, she feels like she is ugly even though she is amazing, but then I feel like I can’t judge because I do the same to myself. I wish the people who had real power and control the images and messages we get fed all day actually thought about what they did for once. I know the girls on page 3 are probably starving themselves. I know the girls in adverts are airbrushed. I know beauty is on the inside. But I still feel like I’m not good enough.

The world just went on, regardless of what happened. That’s how it works.

I’d never get over you regardless of what happened to you. You’re not something I want to get over no matter where I am in my life.

While in this process, you are doing your part and becoming your best self. Regardless of what happens romantically in your life, becoming your best self is most important.

Can you conceive of an injustice, criminal in nature, encroaching upon your life’s course? Yes, you; reading this. -- Does your status, as it were, have you so psychologically fractured you honestly believe you’re immune? If thought occupies you for more than a second, you’re entrenched in ignorance you favor. What should be an innate appreciation of society holds little to no relevance today. Your financial footing takes priority over just about any and everything. Being alive, able bodied, and breathing isn’t enough. What happens when that’s all stripped away? The choice to exist in the creation of social media was yours, where a mere accusation, or negative posting could damage what should be held in the highest regard, your reputation. The cyber establishment’s chokehold is fierce, and you feel it, yet you constantly wonder why you can’t breathe, but hey, you’re “woke” right? Your foundation, personal and or financial might be buckling, but you’re clueless, even though it was you who shared every delicate and secular aspect of your life. Our brand has replaced moral fiber, dictating and tampering with the control of humanity. Are we waiting for the catastrophic crash of mankind? It appears so, when you step back from the edge, watch and listen? That’s a predicament that wasn’t even on your radar, but here you are, “woke,” right? A roof over your head, clothes on your back, sustenance, hell, even the air you breathe, all taken for granted. This should be a daunting notion I’m setting before the appetite of your consciousness, but perhaps it remains far-fetched. The question you should be asking yourself is, how woke are you; really? Regardless of gender, a simple compliment, smile, assistance, or jealousy can ignite a desire to stalk or destroy a person. -- The only untainted bubble any of us occupied was in utero, so you are not above reproach of any kind. Whatever self-made bacterial hubris you’ve placed yourself in, outside of that, speaks to the degree of self-importance encasing you, so it’s impossible for you to appreciate what it is to be “woke,” in the real world.

It doesn't matter whether wishes come true or not, but I believe wishing for something in and of itself has merit. Regardless of whether or not it's possible to make it come true, I think it's good to understand yourself and what you wish for. If you don't know what you want to be like and what you'd like to see happen, your life will be filled with doubt.

Your body-budgeting regions can therefore trick your brain into believing that there is tissue damage, regardless of what is happening in your body. So, when you’re feeling unpleasant, your joints and muscles might hurt more, or you could develop a stomachache. When your body budget’s not in shape, meaning your interoceptive predictions are miscalibrated, your back might hurt more, or your headache might pound harder—not because you have tissue damage but because your nerves are talking back and forth. This is not imaginary pain. It is real.

There are certain moments in our lives that are fated to happen regardless of the paths we choose. We can either be for it or against but ultimately what’s destined to happen will happen.

Unconditional happiness is the highest technique there is. You don’t have to learn Sanskrit or read any scriptures. You don’t have to renounce the world. You just have to really mean it when you say that you choose to be happy. And you have to mean it regardless of what happens. This is truly a spiritual path, and it is as direct and sure a path to Awakening as could possibly exist.

Life should be more about living in the moment than fearing what's happening outside it. It's about honoring what you want to do at any given time, regardless of what everyone else is doing. There's no use worrying about things that are out of your control.

What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity's arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man's planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn't do.

I don't think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do. I think that what is important about the sustained demonstrations that are now happening, is that they are having the effect of refusing to allow these issues to die.

Books or people, you ask. It's a difficult choice, I've got to say. I don't know whether people mean more than books - they're definitely not nicer or funnier or more comforting ... but still, however much I twist and turn the question, I've got to opt for people in the long run. I hope you don't lose all confidence in me now that I've admitted that. I can't for the life of me explain why I have the bad sense to prefer people. If you went purely by numbers, then books would win hands down. I've loved maybe a handful of people in my entire life, compared with tens or maybe even hundreds of books (and here I'm counting only those books I've really loved, the kind that make you happy just to look at them, that make you smile regardless of what else is happening in your life, that you always turn back to like an old friend and can remember exactly where you first "met" them - I'm sure you know just what I'm talking about). But that handful of people you love ... they're surely worth just as much as all those books.

Think of microshifts as tiny increments of change in your day-to-day life. A microshift is changing what you eat for one part of one meal just one time. Then it’s doing that a second time and a third. Before you even realize what’s happening, you’ve adopted a pattern of behavior. What you do every single day accounts for the quality of your life and the degree of your success. It’s not whether you “feel” like putting in the work, but whether or not you do it regardless.

It felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were lucky and sometimes you weren’t, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it wasn’t, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can always be better, and things can always be worse.

It started with a voice-over narrator who asked something along the lines of, “what’s the minimum length of time with the power to change your life? A year? A day? A few minutes?” The answer to that question had come to be that when you were young, one single hour could make a difference. It could change everything. And I … wholeheartedly disagreed. One didn’t need to be young for their life to change in the span of an hour, a handful of minutes, or nothing more than a few seconds. Life changed constantly, wickedly fast and terribly slow, when one least expected it to or after a long time of chasing that change. Life could be turned around, inside out, backward and forward, or it could even transform into something else entirely. And it happened regardless of age, but most importantly, it didn’t care for time. Life-altering moments spanned from a few seconds to decades. It was part of the magic of life. Of living.

Love” means unconditional acceptance of “what is.” It means not rejecting, trying to change, manipulating, or ignoring the truth of what’s happening right now. Instead, it’s being willing to stay with whatever is, regardless of whether it’s pleasurable or painful.

Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. That day is therefore mentally classified as a failure, regardless of what else happens. Virtue cannot resume until tomorrow.

A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless. I love the people where I'm from because they would fight to humanize me if I died violently on film. We would do this for each other, despite anything in our pasts, because no one else would do it for us. We know that we are more than only good and only bad, despite what happens to the names of the dead after they are no longer around to speak them.

Despite what film and music would have women believe, the guys are all hopeless when it comes to the female orgasm. They learn sex from watching porn, where giving the camera a good view is the goal and no one really cares if it works for the girl, because she'll pretend it's awesome regardless. Sex happens up close, and inside, not at camera's length. Guys seem to forget that.

Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.” "An authentically powered person lives in love. Love is the energy of the soul. Love is what heals the personality. There is nothing that cannot be healed by love. There is nothing but love." "Love is the ability to live your life with an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome, the ability within yourself to distinguish within yourself between love and fear and choose love regardless of what is going on inside yourself or outside. This is self-mastery or authentic power...that means you become clear, forgiving, humble and loving... you are grounded in harmony, cooperating, sharing and reverence for life." "When you become completely loving and kind without fear and without thought of harming others, you graudate from the Earth school. That is when reincarnation ends." "The journey from love to love. This is the journey all of us are on- what happens between teh beginning and end of the journey is your life." "Open to others as you would like them to open to you.

When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitent, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counterattacks, made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a malestrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no such occasion did an angel come.

The things that are meant to be are the things we can’t control, the things we don’t cause, the things that happen regardless of who or what we are. Like sunsets and snow-fall and natural disasters. I’ve never believed hardship or suffering was meant to be. I’ve never believed relationships were meant to be. We choose. In large part, we choose. We create, we make mistakes, we burn bridges, we build new ones.

Because money is all things (or can be all things), something strange happens to the person who has it. As Marx says, it's like someone finding, by pure chance, the philosopher's stone. You know the philosopher's stone?" "Yes, I know what the philosopher's stone is." "The philosopher's stone gives you all the knowledge. All of it. All the knowledge of all the sciences. Imagine that someone just finds this stone. By luck. Suddenly he would have all this knowledge, regardless of his individuality. Even if he's a perfect idiot. All of it. All the knowledge.

We do not all blend together. We are not ruined, helpless, a burden. We are not the elderly. We are not old people. Now, still, we're unique. Distinct. Regardless of what we've produced or what happen to our bodies. We each have our own memories and experiences, even if they've been lost and forgotten. They, we, all of us can finally rest.

All of us are working on the same project. Some consciously, with understanding; some without knowing it. (I think this is what Heraclitus meant when he said that “those who sleep are also hard at work”—that they too collaborate in what happens.) Some of us work in one way, and some in others. And those who complain and try to obstruct and thwart things—they help as much as anyone. The world needs them as well. So make up your mind who you’ll choose to work with. The force that directs all things will make good use of you regardless—will put you on its payroll and set you to work. But make sure it’s not the job Chrysippus speaks of: the bad line in the play, put there for laughs.

In other words, to Train in the preliminaries is to stop moaning and feeling sorry for yourself and to recognize instead that regardless of what has happened or why, this is your life and you are the only one equipped to deal with it.

Josy was certain of a few things in his life. He wanted to be an actor. He had an agent who cared about his future. He had friends he’d somehow managed to carve into a family. He liked weed and funky socks with animals on them. He was good at radio trivia (which for some reason didn’t translate so well to bar trivia). He had a bong named Vlad the Inhaler, and maybe his parents would never come around to seeing that while his life would never be what they wanted, it was still a life worth living. And Josiah Erickson was certain that what he felt for Quincy Moore went beyond simple affection. Regardless of what happened tomorrow or any day after, he would remember this moment when he felt so full of light he thought he’d burst.

If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.

PROLOGUE Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you! Destiny is certainly something people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries. If we analyse people’s attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In this perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don’t do. At the other extreme we find the I can do it! believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own Destiny. We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it’s because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen! The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures. Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to write this and for you to be reading it now? There are so many coincidences that had to come together that it might almost seem a whim of destiny that today we are connected by these words. One infinitesimal change in that bunch of circumstances and everything would have been quite different… All these fascinating issues are to be found in Equinox. I enjoy fantasy literature very much because of all the reality it involves. As a reader you’re relaxed, your defences down, trying to enjoy an loosely-structured adventure. This is the ideal space for you to allow yourself to be carried away to an imaginary world that, paradoxically, will leave you reflecting on real life questions that have little to do with fiction, although we may not understand them completely.

At nineteen they can card you in the bars and tell you to get the fuck out, put your sorry act (and sorrier ass) back on the street, but they can’t card you when you sit down to paint a picture, write a poem, or tell a story, by God, and if you reading this happen to be very young, don’t let your elders and supposed betters tell you any different. Sure, you’ve never been to Paris. No, you never ran with the bulls at Pamplona. Yes, you’re a pissant who had no hair in your armpits until three years ago—but so what? If you don’t start out too big for your britches, how are you gonna fill ’em when you grow up? Let it rip regardless of what anybody tells you, that’s my idea; sit down and smoke that baby.

believed in The Good Luck of Right Now. Believing—or maybe even pretending—made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn’t. And what is reality, if it isn’t how we feel about things? What else matters at the end of the day when we lie in bed alone with our thoughts? And isn’t it true, statistically speaking—regardless of whether we believe in luck or not—that good and bad must happen

There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications bend the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also. I do glory when a Negro does something fine, I gloat because he or she has done a fine thing, but not because he was a Negro. That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor. I execrate a foul act of a Negro but again not on the grounds that the doer was a Negro, but because it was foul. A member of my race just happened to be the fouler of humanity. In other words, I know that I cannot accept responsibility for thirteen million people. Every tub must sit on its own bottom regardless. So 'Race Pride' in me had to go. And anyway, why should I be proud to be Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word 'race' is a loose classification of physical characteristics. I tells nothing about the insides of people. Pointing a achievements tells nothing either. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negros did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That wad Carver and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.

Another analogy: imagine if you were walking down the street and every few minutes someone would punch you in the arm. You don’t know who will be punching you, and you don’t know why. You are hurt and wary and weary. You are trying to protect yourself, but you can’t get off this street. Then imagine somebody walks by, maybe gesticulating wildly in interesting conversation, and they punch you in the arm on accident. Now imagine that this is the last straw, that this is where you scream. That person may not have meant to punch you in the arm, but the issue for you is still the fact that people keep punching you in the arm. Regardless of why that last person punched you, there’s a pattern that needs to be addressed, and your sore arm is testimony to that. But what often happens instead is that people demand that you prove that each person who punched you in the arm in the past meant to punch you in the arm before they’ll acknowledge that too many people are punching you in the arm. The real tragedy is that you get punched in the arm constantly, not that one or two people who accidentally punched you in the arm might be accused of doing it on purpose. They still contributed to the pain that you have endured—a pain bigger than that one punch—and they are responsible for being a part of that, whether they meant to or not.

What is Destiny? Is it a doctrine formulated by aristocrats and philosophers arguing that there is some unseen driving force predicting the outcomes of every minuscule and life altering moment in one's life? Or is it the artistry illustrated by those under-qualifed and over-eager to give their future meaning and their ambitions hope? Is it a declaration by those who refuse to accept that we are alone in this universe, spinning randomly through a matrix of accidental coincidences? Or is it the assumptions made by those who concede that there is a divine plan or pre-ordained path for each human being,regardless of their current station? I think destiny is a bit of a tease.... It's syndical taunts and teases mock those naive enough to believe in its black jack dealing of inevitable futures. Its evolution from puppy dogs and ice cream to razor blades and broken mirrors characterizes the fickle nature of its sordid underbelly. Those relying on its decisive measures will fracture under its harsh rules. Those embracing the fact that life happens at a million miles a minute will flourish in its random grace. Destiny has afforded me the most magical memories and unbelievably tragic experiences that have molded and shaped my life into what it is today...beautiful. I fully accept the mirage that destiny promises and the reality it can produce. Without the invisible momentum carried with its sincere fabrication of coming attraction, destiny is the covenant we rely on to get ourselves through the day. To the destiny I know awaits me, I thank you in advance. Don't cry because it's over....smile because it happened.

Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program. There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools. You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.

People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done. I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.

The reality is that if we took the legally sanctioned practices from the animal farming industries and then applied them to other situations, we would think those practices horrendous. For example, if dog owners were cutting off their pets' tails and chopping their teeth out, we would condemn that as being horrific animal abuse. But we do it to pigs and call it high welfare. If someone was killing puppies by thumping their heads against a wall or dislocating their necks, we would call that evil, yet that happens to animals such as piglets and chickens and we call it humane. But the experience is the same for the individual animal, regardless of what species they are.

No matter what happens, I want that piece of music to live. When people hear it, I want them to think about what we tried to do, regardless of whether we succeed. And I want them to know that without you, Ana Incarnate, whatever Janna had planned would have just happened without opposition. You opened our eyes. I want that legacy to continue.

As I bite into the banana bread, I realize if all around me is the evidence of what happens without my asking, doesn’t that mean that there’s possibility for more? A more trusting love where I could let myself ask for things, let myself be vulnerable and imperfect and even dispensable? A more magnanimous, forgiving kind of love where sometimes people give me what I ask for and sometimes they don’t and it’s okay? Where it’s okay to be disappointed and it’s okay to be disappointing—where we can love each other and ourselves regardless?

To me the most interesting question of our human existence is: “How much is in our control, and how much is going to happen regardless of what we do?” I knew that Dannie would live that hour and it would be exactly the same as the hour she lives at the beginning of the book, meaning all of the same things would happen. But I also knew it would mean something entirely different than what she’d been anticipating. That, to me, is really the thesis of the novel: we can think we know what is coming, but we can never know what it will mean.

This new feeling hasn’t changed me, hasn’t made me happy or suddenly enlightened, as I dreamed - just like the feeling for my son. Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith - I don’t know what it is - but this feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul. ‘I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray - but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn’t practice. She may grow up to love women instead of men, or to decide she simply doesn’t believe in marriage. No matter. These dual contingencies govern her until they’re answered, even if the answers are nobody and never.

Consider the possibility now that anything could happen. I’m not asking you to believe this, but only to consider that it might be true. Simply thinking this thought—that miracles are possible—does more to pave the way for your healing than you can imagine. It opens the door to a realm of infinite possibilities, regardless of what you have been through or what you are going through now. The

When you spend time as part of a female minority in bars full of drunk men, it was hard not to think that some of them would have hit on me for no other reason than that I was female, regardless of how I acted, what I said, or what I looked like. I therefore learned that getting hit on wasn’t necessarily a compliment and, the later it happened in the evening, the less of a compliment it was. - Away from the Spotlight

Leaders instill courage in the hearts of those who follow. This rarely happens through words alone. It generally requires action. It goes back to what we said earlier: Somebody has to go first. By going first, the leader furnishes confidence to those who follow. As a next generation leader, you will be called upon to go first. That will require courage. But in stepping out you will give the gift of courage to those who are watching. What do I believe is impossible to do in my field, but if it could be done would fundamentally change my business? What has been done is safe. But to attempt a solution to a problem that plagues an entire industry - in my case, the local church - requires courage. Unsolved problems are gateways to the future. To those who have the courage to ask the question and the tenacity to hang on until they discover or create an answer belongs the future. Don’t allow the many good opportunities to divert your attention from the one opportunity that has the greatest potential. Learn to say no. There will always be more opportunities than there is time to pursue them. Leaders worth following are willing to face and embrace current reality regardless of how discouraging or embarrassing it might be. It is impossible to generate sustained growth or progress if your plan for the future is not rooted in reality. Be willing to face the truth regardless of how painful it might be. If fear causes you to retreat from your dreams, you will never give the world anything new. it is impossible to lead without a dream. When leaders are no longer willing to dream, it is only a short time before followers are unwilling to follow. Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity? Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away. Where there is no uncertainty, there is no longer the need for leadership. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for leadership. Your capacity as a leader will be determined by how well you learn to deal with uncertainty. My enemy is not uncertainty. It is not even my responsibility to remove the uncertainty. It is my responsibility to bring clarity into the midst of the uncertainty. As leaders we can afford to be uncertain, but we cannot afford to be unclear. People will follow you in spite of a few bad decisions. People will not follow you if you are unclear in your instruction. As a leader you must develop the elusive skill of leading confidently and purposefully onto uncertain terrain. Next generation leaders must fear a lack of clarity more than a lack of accuracy. The individual in your organization who communicates the clearest vision will often be perceived as the leader. Clarity is perceived as leadership. Uncertainty exposes a lack of knowledge. Pretending exposes a lack of character. Express your uncertainty with confidence. You will never maximize your potential in any area without coaching. It is impossible. Self-evaluation is helpful, but evaluation from someone else is essential. You need a leadership coach. Great leaders are great learners. God, in His wisdom, has placed men and women around us with the experience and discernment we often lack. Experience alone doesn’t make you better at anything. Evaluated experience is what enables you to improve your performance. As a leader, what you don’t know can hurt you. What you don’t know about yourself can put a lid on your leadership. You owe it to yourself and to those who have chosen to follow you to open the doors to evaluation. Engage a coach. Success doesn’t make anything of consequence easier. Success just raises the stakes. Success brings with it the unanticipated pressure of maintaining success. The more successful you are as a leader, the more difficult this becomes. There is far more pressure at the top of an organization than you might imagine.

There is no possible reply to these heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose assertions, except to note that they would justify any policy on any subject anywhere, regardless of its empirically observed consequences. In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by the original criteria, then by criteria extemporized later—and if not by empirical criteria, then by criteria sufficiently subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation. Evidence becomes irrelevant.

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. He was outdoors, and his own flesh had done it. To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing—unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income. But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one’s own kin outdoors—that was criminal.

Yet the people who cry, “What about the presumption of innocence?” often behave as though there is no objective answer to “Did he do it?” until the trial is over. As though they think people accused of crimes are literally “innocent until proven guilty.” I’m not sure how that would work, exactly—once the verdict comes in, would the accused and the victim travel back in time, so the rape in question could either happen or not happen, based on what the jury decided? If you can’t grasp that any person accused of a crime has already either done it or not done it, regardless of what a future jury has to say, you have a very interesting understanding not only of time and space but of the law. How are police supposed to investigate suspects and make arrests if no one is allowed to draw a reasonable inference that someone is guilty until a jury has officially said so? How are prosecutors supposed to meet their burden of proof, so a jury can officially say so? In reality, lots of people within the justice system—let alone outside it—start to presume guilt after a certain point, because that’s their job

PROLOGUE Equinox: Whispers of Destiny Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you. Destiny is certainly a topic people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries. If we analyze people’s attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme there are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In that perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don’t do. At the other extreme we find the I can do it! Believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own destiny. We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it’s because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen. The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures. Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to write this and for you to be reading it now? There are so many coincidences that had to come together that it might almost seem a whim of destiny that today we are connected by these words. One infinitesimal change in that set of circumstances and everything would have been quite different… All these fascinating ideas are to be found in Equinox. I am drawn to fantasy literature because of all the coincidences to reality. As a reader you’re relaxed, your defenses down, trusting the writer to take you on an adventure. This is the ideal space for you to allow yourself to be carried away to an imaginary world that, paradoxically, will leave you reflecting on life questions that have little to do with fiction, but I ask you that perhaps maybe they do.   Gonzalo Guma

no way to effectively explain violations that are not overt. It is a rhetorical hellscape. A casual reduction so frequent it is mundane. Almost too mundane for the deployment of the R word, as with a certain sect of Good White Person the accusation overshadows the act. Racism! I should yell, because I’m sure Rebecca will receive it in the uppercase regardless, and already I feel her seizing on the drama of its implication, even though racism is often so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes. So it has taken a long time for me to get here. To say, Yes, this is what happened. It happened just like that.

Yet for us to reach our full potential, we need to see our shadows clearly and then choose to learn, grow, and change. Who we’ll become in the future always begins with the total awareness and acceptance of who we are right now. In turn, we can stop wasting energy denying what’s already here—freeing us to see clearly what’s happening and then respond effectively. Courage also helps us take responsibility for and not second-guess previous choices. If wisdom was present, courage supports us in trusting that it was the right choice—regardless of how things turned out later. And if wisdom wasn’t present when we made the initial choice, courage helps us learn from the situation so we can make wiser choices going forward.

I noticed regardless if they are surrounded by weeds, they still grow, and they are so colorful because there isn’t anyone to intervene with the process of Mother Nature. They know what to do. It comes naturally. I think everything should happen naturally, but that is impossible because humans are good at interfering with the natural process of life. They fuck it up, and that is why things are so complicated. They think they know what is best, but in reality, they are just in the way. They make things worse than they should be. If human beings just let nature take its course, I believe we would have more happy people in the world ... as opposed to people who suffer by the hands and actions of someone who has fucked up their life. Then they have to figure it out alone—regardless of age.

Sonya lays sound asleep, breathing deeply. I brush a wisp of hair out of her face. She’s twitching, gently snoring, and she smells of cigarette smoke from the bar and something else—cool ranch and toothpaste, I think. Regardless, she is more beautiful than ever. I sit next to her and speak in a whisper. “You know I will always love you. Of all the people I’ve met in my life, you are the most exceptional, the most caring, and the most deserving of happiness. I wish I could offer you more, but the best I can do is leave you alone. If you can just stay out of this place, stay away from this town and all the things that have happened here, I know you’ll find what you’re looking for.” I try to resist but I can’t help myself. I gently kiss her on the lips before going to sleep in the other room.

The subjects who thought their earnings were inferior wanted to increase redistribution, as before. But they wanted everyone’s vote to count equally, regardless of whether the other player agreed or disagreed with them. The subjects who thought they were superior wanted to reduce redistribution, and they also voted to reject the votes of those who disagreed with them. The more they saw the other player as incompetent and irrational, the less they wanted his vote to count. This research was the first to show that feeling superior in status magnifies our feeling that we see reality as it is while our opponents are deluded. It supports the idea that as the top and the bottom of the social ladder drift further apart, our politics will become more divisive. That is exactly what has happened over the past several decades.

I was taught of a courageous love--of people who could love those who hated them, despised them, and cursed them. A heroic love that leapt lines of segregation, compassion that tore down walls, a determined empathy that saw value in every child regardless of race, geography, or circumstance. An activist love that ignited a nation's moral imagination and galvanized a collective will. Heroes of every faith, color, and sexual orientation, who left behind the comfort of anonymity and marched knowing they would be beaten, boarded buses knowing they would be burned--we are a product of their love. A love that asserted the fundamental idea that we are in this together, bound by destiny, that what happens to my American brother or sister affects me, that our connection mandates an obligation. I was taught of a courageous love.

There is no plan...You need to make smart choices, But you can make career decisions for two different types of reasons. You can do something for instrumental reasons -- because you think it's going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it's worthwhile...or you can do something for fundamental reasons -- because you think it's inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to. The dirty little secret is that insturmental reasons usually don't work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what' going to happen. So you end up stuck. The most successful people -- not all of the time, but most of the time -- make decisions for fundamental reasons. They take a job or join a company because it will let them do interesting work in a cool place -- even if they don't know exactly where it will lead. They're not fools. They're enlightened pragmatists.

Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

The problem is most people don’t really think prayer makes a difference in how God acts. The majority of us are fatalistic when it comes to prayer. Lots of people honestly believe that what’s going to happen is going to happen, with or without prayer. That kind of a twisted, lazy theology is what sucks the life out of people’s prayers.[13] Are you saying my prayers really make a difference in what God does or does not do? Yes. Do not miss that. Many Jesus followers do. What I’m saying is really important. Prayer changes reality. Prayer moves the hand of God. Dallas Willard writes: “God’s response to our prayers is not a charade. He does not pretend that he is answering our prayer when he is only doing what he was going to do anyway. Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do. The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best…of course this is not the biblical idea of prayer, nor is it the idea of people for whom prayer is a vital part of life.”[14] When you pray, things happen. And the reverse is also true. When you don’t pray, things don’t happen. It is written, “You have not because you ask not.” Do you know what that really means? You have not because you ask not![15] What a novel idea. I repeat: Prayer changes reality. Prayer moves the hand of God.

Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.” "An authentically powered person lives in love. Love is the energy of the soul. Love is what heals the personality. There is nothing that cannot be healed by love. There is nothing but love." "Love is the ability to live your life with an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome, the ability within yourself to distinguish within yourself between love and fear and choose love regardless of what is going on inside yourself or outside. This is self-mastery or authentic power...that means you become clear, forgiving, humble and loving... you are grounded in harmony, cooperating, sharing and reverence for life." "When you become completely loving and kind without fear and without thought of harming others, you graudate from the Earth school. That is when reincarnation ends." "The journey from love to love. This is the journey all of us are on- what happens between the beginning and end of the journey is your life." "Open to others as you would like them to open to you

Lillian kept her face against Marcus’s shoulder. As mortified as she had been on the day that he had seen her playing rounders in her knickers, this was ten times worse. She would never be able to face Simon Hunt again, she thought, and groaned. “It’s all right,” Marcus murmured. “He’ll keep his mouth shut.” “I don’t care whom he tells,” Lillian managed to say. “I’m not going to marry you. Not if you compromised me a hundred times.” “Lillian,” he said, a sudden tremor of laughter in his voice, “it would be my greatest pleasure to compromise you a hundred times. But first I would like to know what I’ve done this morning that is so unforgivable.” “To begin with, you talked to my father.” His brows lifted a fraction of an inch. “That offended you?” “How could it not? You’ve behaved in the most highhanded manner possible by going behind my back and trying to arrange things with my father, without one word to me—” “Wait,” Marcus said sardonically, rolling to his side and sitting up in an easy movement. He reached out with a broad hand to pull Lillian up to face him. “I was not being high-handed in meeting with your father. I was adhering to tradition. A prospective bridegroom usually approaches a woman’s father before he makes a formal proposal.” A gently caustic note entered his voice as he added, “Even in America. Unless I’ve been misinformed?” The clock on the mantel dispensed a slow half-minute before Lillian managed a grudging reply. “Yes, that’s how it’s usually done. But I assumed that you and he had already made a betrothal agreement, regardless of whether or not it was what I wanted—” “Your assumption was incorrect. We did not discuss any details of a betrothal, nor was anything mentioned about a dowry or a wedding date. All I did was ask your father for permission to court you.” Lillian stared at him with surprised chagrin, until another question occurred to her. “What about your discussion with Lord St. Vincent just now?” Now it was Marcus’s turn to look chagrined. “That was high-handed,” he admitted.

In a similar study conducted at Yale University, undergraduate participants were offered the opportunity to use the same kind of casuistry to maintain the occupational status quo. The students evaluated one of two applicants (Michael or Michelle) for the position of police chief. One applicant was streetwise, a tough risk-taker, popular with other officers, but poorly educated. By contrast, the educated applicant was well schooled, media savvy, and family oriented, but lacked street experience and was less popular with the other officers. The undergraduate participants judged the job applicant on various streetwise and education criteria, and then rated the importance of each criterion for success as a police chief. Participants who rated Michael inflated the importance of being an educated, media-savvy family man when these were qualities Michael possessed, but devalued these qualities when he happened to lack them. No such helpful shifting of criteria took place for Michelle. As a consequence, regardless of whether he was streetwise or educated, the demands of the social world were shaped to ensure that Michael had more of what it took to be a successful police chief. As the authors put it, participants may have ‘felt that they had chosen the right man for the job, when in fact they had chosen the right job criteria for the man.’21 Ironically, the people who were most convinced of their own objectivity discriminated the most.

Regardless, his crankiness had hit a level not previously documented in the history of the universe. That was saying something, considering I’d grown up with three older sisters who all had periods at the same time. Because of them, most things—most people—didn’t bother me. I knew what it was like to be bullied, and Aiden never crossed the line into being unnecessarily mean. He was just a jackass sometimes. He was lucky I had a tiny, itty, bitty crush on him; otherwise, he would have gotten the shank years ago. Then again, just about everyone with eyes who happened to also like men, had some kind of a thing for Aiden Graves. When he raised his eyebrows and looked at me from beneath those curly black eyelashes, flashing me rich-brown eyes set deep into a face that I’d only seen smile in the presence of dogs, I swallowed and shook my head slowly as I gritted my teeth and took him in. The size of a small building, he should have had these big, uneven features that made him look like a caveman, but of course he didn’t. Apparently, he liked to defy every stereotype he’d ever been assigned in his life. He was smart, fast, coordinated, and—as far as I knew—had never seen a game of hockey. He had only said ‘eh’ in front of me twice, and he didn’t consume animal protein. The man didn’t eat bacon. He was the last person I would ever consider polite, and he never apologized. Ever. Basically, he was an anomaly; a Canadian football-playing, plant-based lifestyle—he didn’t like calling himself a vegan—anomaly that was strangely proportional all over and so handsome I might have thanked God for giving me eyes on a couple of occasions.

Christianity . . . does not [simply] stand in the history that we only know and which knowledge we take to ourselves so that we say “Christ died for us and has broken death in us and made it into life. He has paid the debt for us. We need only to comfort ourselves with this and firmly believe that it has happened.” Since we in ourselves find that sin in the flesh is living, desirous and active, that it might work, the new birth out of Christ must be something else that does not work along with the sinful flesh and that does not will sin. . . . Here a Christian is to consider why he calls himself a Christian and is truly to consider whether he is one. Because I may learn to know and understand that I am a sinner, and that Christ has killed my sins on the cross and shed His blood for me, this in no way makes a Christian out of me. The inheritance is only for the children. A maid in the house knows well what the wife would eagerly have. This does not therefore make her an inheritor of the wife’s goods. The devil also knows that there is a God [James 2:19]. That does not therefore make him an angel again. However, if the maid in the household marries the wife’s son, then she can truly come to the inheritance of the wife’s goods. . . . The scorner and the titular Christian is the whore’s son, who must be cast out for he is not to inherit Christ’s inheritance in the kingdom of God (Galatians 4:30). He is no use, and only Babel, a confusion of the one language into many languages. He is only a talker and arguer about the inheritance and wishes to talk and argue to it with his mouth-hypocrisy and appearance of holiness, but he is only a blood-thirsty murderer of Abel his brother who is the true heir. . . . If one says, “I have the will and wish eagerly to do good, but I have earthly flesh that holds me [back] so that I cannot [act]; nevertheless, I shall be blessed by grace because of the merit of Christ. Since I console myself indeed with His suffering and merit, He will take me out of grace, without any merit of mine, and forgive me my sins,” he acts like one who knows of good food for his health and does not eat it, but who eats instead the poison from which he becomes ill and dies. What does it help the soul if it knows the way to God and does not wish to take it, but goes instead on a way of error, and does not reach God? What does it help the soul if it consoles itself with the sonship of Christ, [with] His suffering and death, and is itself hypocritical, but cannot enter into the childlike birth so that it is born a true child out of Christ’s Spirit, out of His suffering, death and resurrection? Certainly and truly, this tickling and hypocrisy about Christ’s merits aside from the true inherited sonship is false and a lie, [regardless of] who teaches. This consolation belongs to the repentant sinner who is in strife with sin and God’s wrath when the temptations come that the devil sets on the soul. Then the soul is to wrap itself completely in the suffering and death of Christ in His merit. [The Way to Christ, trans. Peter Erb, 138-139, 156-158]

To understand how shame is influenced by culture, we need to think back to when we were children or young adults, and we first learned how important it is to be liked, to fit in, and to please others. The lessons were often taught by shame; sometimes overtly, other times covertly. Regardless of how they happened, we can all recall experiences of feeling rejected, diminished and ridiculed. Eventually, we learned to fear these feelings. We learned how to change our behaviors, thinking and feelings to avoid feeling shame. In the process, we changed who we were and, in many instances, who we are now. Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. We are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. As infants, our need for connection is about survival. As we grow older, connection means thriving—emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually. Connection is critical because we all have the basic need to feel accepted and to believe that we belong and are valued for who we are. Shame unravels our connection to others. In fact, I often refer to shame as the fear of disconnection—the fear of being perceived as flawed and unworthy of acceptance or belonging. Shame keeps us from telling our own stories and prevents us from listening to others tell their stories. We silence our voices and keep our secrets out of the fear of disconnection. When we hear others talk about their shame, we often blame them as a way to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. Hearing someone talk about a shaming experience can sometimes be as painful as actually experiencing it for ourselves. Like courage, empathy and compassion are critical components of shame resilience. Practicing compassion allows us to hear shame. Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill that allows us to respond to others in a meaningful, caring way. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes—to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding. When we share a difficult experience with someone, and that person responds in an open, deeply connected way—that’s empathy. Developing empathy can enrich the relationships we have with our partners, colleagues, family members and children. In Chapter 2, I’ll discuss the concept of empathy in great detail. You’ll learn how it works, how we can learn to be empathic and why the opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The prerequisite for empathy is compassion. We can only respond empathically if we are willing to hear someone’s pain. We sometimes think of compassion as a saintlike virtue. It’s not. In fact, compassion is possible for anyone who can accept the struggles that make us human—our fears, imperfections, losses and shame. We can only respond compassionately to someone telling her story if we have embraced our own story—shame and all. Compassion is not a virtue—it is a commitment.

She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm. So much for the natural relation between the sexes. But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life. They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

Like stress, emotion is a concept we often invoke without a precise sense of its meaning. And, like stress, emotions have several components. The psychologist Ross Buck distinguishes between three levels of emotional responses, which he calls Emotion I, Emotion II and Emotion III, classified according to the degree we are conscious of them. Emotion III is the subjective experience, from within oneself. It is how we feel. In the experience of Emotion III there is conscious awareness of an emotional state, such as anger or joy or fear, and its accompanying bodily sensations. Emotion II comprises our emotional displays as seen by others, with or without our awareness. It is signalled through body language — “non-verbal signals, mannerisms, tones of voices, gestures, facial expressions, brief touches, and even the timing of events and pauses between words. [They] may have physiologic consequences — often outside the awareness of the participants.” It is quite common for a person to be oblivious to the emotions he is communicating, even though they are clearly read by those around him. Our expressions of Emotion II are what most affect other people, regardless of our intentions. A child’s displays of Emotion II are also what parents are least able to tolerate if the feelings being manifested trigger too much anxiety in them. As Dr. Buck points out, a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self-shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised…. The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.” The stress literature amply documents that helplessness, real or perceived, is a potent trigger for biological stress responses. Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so. People often find themselves in situations of learned helplessness — for example, someone who feels stuck in a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship, in a stressful job or in a lifestyle that robs him or her of true freedom. Emotion I comprises the physiological changes triggered by emotional stimuli, such as the nervous system discharges, hormonal output and immune changes that make up the flight-or-fight reaction in response to threat. These responses are not under conscious control, and they cannot be directly observed from the outside. They just happen. They may occur in the absence of subjective awareness or of emotional expression. Adaptive in the acute threat situation, these same stress responses are harmful when they are triggered chronically without the individual’s being able to act in any way to defeat the perceived threat or to avoid it. Self-regulation, writes Ross Buck, “involves in part the attainment of emotional competence, which is defined as the ability to deal in an appropriate and satisfactory way with one’s own feelings and desires.” Emotional competence presupposes capacities often lacking in our society, where “cool” — the absence of emotion — is the prevailing ethic, where “don’t be so emotional” and “don’t be so sensitive” are what children often hear, and where rationality is generally considered to be the preferred antithesis of emotionality. The idealized cultural symbol of rationality is Mr. Spock, the emotionally crippled Vulcan character on Star Trek.