Reset My Life Quotes

I don’t ever want to hurt anyone, but I really wish there was something like a reset button on my life.

But I feel like I've spent most of my life wishing for someone else's approval, or relying on their reassurance that I'm living my life the right way. And somewhere along the way, I forgot to care what I thought about myself. I feel trapped beneath all the things that make me think less of myself. If my life were a video game, I would have hit the reset button a long time ago.

Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

Home disappeared for me the day my mother died. And ever since, I’ve been chasing the ghost of a feeling. Looking for a reset that would put my life back in order. But at some point, a person has to stop chasing something that doesn’t exist and just move on.

I have learned to prioritize my actions into three buckets: things that drain my energy, things I don’t mind and are important and useful, and things that give me energy and bring me joy. My goal is to break my daily actions down so that I spend none of my time on tasks that fall into the first category, 10 percent of my time on the second category, and 90 percent of my time in the final category, the one that Robert Greene calls primal inclinations. When I find myself drifting too far from the goal, I reset my actions.

I sensed that one of the most significant events of my life had taken place: that which tells us about ourselves exists in fragments, scattered in time and space... I sensed that my life was being refracted in the present moment like a beam in a magnifying glass, refracted and reset by this lens of understanding; I learned what I had come for, and that knowledge, it turns out, had always been with me, in my memory.

Growing up is terrifying. When you’re young, you have this feeling inside of you that you’ll eventually get the chance to do and try everything in life, because life looks so infinitely long from the perspective of a kid. Then suddenly, you realize that every choice you make unchooses all the other ones. This isn’t a video game. There’s no reset button and no infinite lives. Every single decision I make is permanent, and the more I make, the slimmer my path becomes in this shrinking, dark forest we call adulthood.

I wished that life could be reset, but reset from when?

It felt like something had pushed the reset button and my life had only begun. I should have asked for a birth certificate for myself.

I spend my life watching the sun come and go as part of my non-routine routine.

After the second of two hospital stays following a difficult time, I went to a program for those whose lives have fallen apart. Often someone would say—weeping, shaking, or dry eyed—that he or she wished to go back in time and make everything right again. I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born. I was quiet most of the time, until I was told I was evasive and not making progress. But my pain was my private matter, I thought; if I could understand and articulate my problems I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Do you want to share anything, I was prompted when I had little to offer. By then I felt my hope had run out. I saw the revolving door admitting new people and letting old people out into the world; similar stories were told with the same remorse and despair; the lectures were on the third repeat. What if I were stuck forever in that basement room? I broke down and could feel a collective sigh: my tears seemed to prove that finally I intended to cooperate. I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury.

One day a week, we’d turn off the technology in our lives. We called it our “technology Shabbat.” From sundown on Fridays to sundown on Saturdays, we shut down every cellphone, iPad, TV, and computer in the house. This practice has been profoundly life-changing for us. It resets my soul each week.

It’s Miss Foster’s decision,” Mr. Forkle interrupted. Sophie snorted. “Right. Just like it was my decision the day you reset my abilities. I could either stay malfunctioning, or risk my life to fix everything—and bonus: It was the only way I’d be able to heal Prentice and Alden. That’s not much of a choice, is it?

There is humility in confession. A recognition of flaws. To hear myself say out loud these shameful secrets meant I acknowledged my flaws. I also for the first time was given the opportunity to contextualize anew the catalogue of beliefs and prejudices, simply by exposing them to another, for the first time hearing the words ‘Yes, but have you looked at it this way?’ This was a helpful step in gaining a new perspective on my past, and my past was a significant proportion of who I believed myself to be. It felt like I had hacked into my own past. Unravelled all the erroneous and poisonous information I had unconsciously lived with and lived by and with necessary witness, the accompaniment of another man, reset the beliefs I had formed as a child and left unamended through unnecessary fear. Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable and soothed. ‘My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.’ Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do, and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present. Yes, it is wrong that I was abused as a child but there is no reason for me to relive it, consciously or unconsciously, in the way I conduct my adult relationships. My perceptions of reality, even my own memories, are not objective or absolute, they are a biased account and they can be altered. It is possible to reprogram your mind. Not alone, because a tendency, a habit, an addiction will always reassert by its own invisible momentum, like a tide. With this program, with the support of others, and with this mysterious power, this new ability to change, we achieve a new perspective, and a new life.

I was working from home at the time and sometimes indulged in a little wander around my yard, a hard reset before I got back to work. Today, however, I had ignored the nice weather and instead put my head on my desk, forehead pressed to the Formica and arms covering my skull. I had joked with one of my yoga-loving co-workers that I was developing a series of poses that we could do at our desks. A head-in-hands slump over galleys called "Drudge's Hunch". The arms overhead seated stretch called "Fluorescent Salutation". The hand out position used to catch the fire door so it didn't slam and bother everyone. That was "Worrier's Pose". My current pose was called "Nuclear Fallout".

Long distance running is meditation. When I finish a long run, it’s like my brain has been washed. All the stress and negative thoughts are left somewhere on those long kilometers. At the end, the illusions of the past and future are removed from my mind, and it is set back to zero, so I feel I am totally in the present moment, reset, and ready to restart my life afresh.

It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves -- I'm thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.

Peter sits with his back to the wall in the hallway. He looks up at me when I lean over him, his dark hair stuck to his forehead from the melted snow. “Did you reset her?” he says. “No,” I say. “Didn’t think you would have the nerve.” “It’s not about nerve. You know what? Whatever.” I shake my head and hold up the vial of memory serum. “Are you still set on this?” He nods. “You could just do the work, you know,” I say. “You could make better decisions, make a better life.” “Yeah, I could,” he says. “But I won’t. We both know that.” I do know that. I know that change is difficult, and comes slowly, and that it is the work of many days strung together in a long line until the origin of them is forgotten. He is afraid that he will not be able to put in that work, that he will squander those days, and that they will leave him worse off than he is now. And I understand that feeling--I understand being afraid of yourself. So I have him sit on one of the couches, and I ask him what he wants me to tell him about himself, after his memories disappear like smoke. He just shakes his head. Nothing. He wants to retain nothing. Peter takes the vial with a shaking hand and twists off the cap. The liquid trembles inside it, almost spilling over the lip. He holds it under his nose to smell it. “How much should I drink?” he says, and I think I hear his teeth chattering. “I don’t think it makes a difference,” I say. “Okay. Well…here goes.” He lifts the vial up to the light like he is toasting me. When he touches it to his mouth, I say, “Be brave.” Then he swallows. And I watch Peter disappear.

I tend to get myself into messes. I don’t know why I am such a magnet for finding myself in a pickle, but it’s frequent and funny. Almost every day I will lose something or drop something or forget an appointment. The good news is that I have never left a child somewhere … so far—knock on wood. But even with all of my I Love Lucy adventures, I truly enjoy life. If I had to wait for perfection before I have a good time, I’d be too old and hard of hearing to appreciate it. Awhile back I shared a post on my blog called “20 Ways to Reset When the Kids Are Having a Hard Day.” It went viral! I realized I had hit on something that tired moms needed to hear … that there is a way out of those desperate moments, and the key is YOU. And it’s about more than just surviving. This is about true, deep, life-changing joy that can spring from those awful moments.

HEALTHY BOUNDARIES Minimalism helps you set healthy boundaries by giving you the clarity to see all the things you’re spinning your wheels on. Resetting boundaries to align with priorities is an ongoing process in a minimalist lifestyle, but it’s not an unwelcome chore. The rewards of more being and less striving encourage me to keep going on this journey. If I don’t prioritize my life, someone or something else will. MORE TIME Keeping more than we need, whether it’s possessions or activities, brings a fog into our daily lives that makes it harder to think clearly. Under the influence of clutter, we may underestimate how much time we’re giving to the less important stuff. When we say, “If I could find the time . . .” we’re really talking about how we choose to use our time. Minimalism helps you see how you’re spending your time and to think more clearly about how you would really like to spend it.

It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day? If the answer is no, fixing that is the first thing I recommend. It doesn’t matter so much if they go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms. The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars, as they are digested too rapidly, and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip). This is because anxious and depressed people are already stressed, particularly if their lives have not been under control for a good while. Their bodies are therefore primed to hypersecrete insulin, if they engage in any complex or demanding activity. If they do so after fasting all night and before eating, the excess insulin in their bloodstream will mop up all their blood sugar. Then they become hypoglycemic and psych​ophys​iologi​cally unstable.22 All day. Their systems cannot be reset until after more sleep. I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.

Of course, we suffer from bottomless avidity. Our lives are so precious to us, we are so watchful of waste. Or perhaps a better name for it would be the Sense of Personal Destiny. Yes, I think that is better than avidity. Shall my life by one-thousandth of an inch fall short of its ultimate possibility? It is a different thing to value oneself, and to prize oneself crazily. And then there are our plans, idealizations. These are dangerous, too. They can consume us like parasites, eat us, drink us, and leave us lifelessly prostrate. And yet we are always inviting the parasite, as if we were eager to be drained and eaten. It is because we have been taught there is no limit to what a man can be. Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. But whether, after life, he went to hell or to heaven, his place among other men was given. It could not be contested. But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it, and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on. Great minds, great beauties, great lovers and criminals surround us. From the great sadness and desperation of Werthers and Don Juans we went to the great ruling images of Napoleons; from these to murderers who had that right over victims because they were greater than the victims; to men who felt privileged to approach others with a whip; to schoolboys and clerks who roared like revolutionary lions; to those pimps and subway creatures, debaters in midnight cafeterias who believed they could be great in treachery and catch the throats of those they felt were sound and well in the lassos of their morbidity; to dreams of greatly beautiful shadows embracing on a flawless screen. Because of these things we hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. The fear of lagging pursues and maddens us. The fear lies in us like a cloud. It makes an inner climate of darkness. And occasionally there is a storm and hate and wounding rain out of us.

Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings from the wicked who assail me, from my mortal enemies who surround me. They close up their callous hearts, and their mouths speak with arrogance. They have tracked me down, they now surround me, with eyes alert, to throw me to the ground. They are like a lion hungry for prey, like a great lion crouching in cover. Rise up, O LORD, confront them, bring them down; rescue me from the wicked by your sword. O LORD, by your hand save me from such men, from men of this world whose reward is in this life.”   -Psalm 17:8-14

Gasping for air. That’s what stood out most from Sonya’s initial symptoms of hyperactivation. Her body would involuntarily hyperventilate each time she would describe or even think too deeply about the stresses in her life. She would gasp, and explain that her throat felt tight, then say between gulps of air, “I just…can’t catch…my breath.” This happened often throughout our initial sessions. It was so uncomfortable for her. I wanted so badly to help.

Hmm,” said Tammy, “and once more your naive optimism regarding the human species reveals its hopeless disconnect with reality. While it was well-established that prior to the Great EM Pulse following the Benefactors’ arrival in Earth orbit, virtually every human being on the planet had already become a drooling automaton with bloodshot eyes glued to a pixelated screen, even as the world melted around them in a toxic stew of air pollution, water pollution, vehicles pouring out carcinogenic waste gases, and leaking gas pipelines springing up everywhere along with earthquake-inducing fracking and oil spills in the oceans and landslides due to deforestation and heat waves due to global warming and ice caps melting and islands and coastlines drowning and forests dying and idiots building giant walls and—” “All right, whatever!” Hadrian snapped. “But don’t you see? This is the future!” “Yeah, that statement makes sense.” “The future from then, I mean. Now is their future, even if it’s our now, or will be, I mean—oh fuck it. The point is, Tammy, we’re supposed to have matured as a species, as a civilization. We’re supposed to have united globally in a warm gush of integrity, ethical comportment, and peace and love as our next stage of universal consciousness bursts forth like a blinding light to engulf us all in a golden age of enlightenment and postscarcity well-being.” “Hahahaha,” Tammy laughed and then coughed and choked. “Stop! You’re killing me!” Beta spoke. “I am attempting to compute said golden age, Captain. Alas, my Eternally Needful Consumer Index is redlining and descending into a cursive loop of existential panic. All efforts to reset parameters yield the Bluescreen of Incomprehension. Life without mindless purchase? Without pointless want? Without ephemeral endorphin spurts? Without gaming-induced frontal lobe permanent degradation resulting in short-tempered antisocial short-attention-span psychological generational profiles? Impossible.” “The EMP should have given us the breathing space to pause and reevaluate our value system,” said Hadrian. “Instead, it was universal panic. Riots in Discount Super Stores, millions trampled—they barely noticed the lights going out, for crying out loud.

I was always busy going into these meetings, with lots of things to do, but my time with Bill always gave me a sense of perspective. That whatever I was doing was important, but he showed me that what really matters at the end of the day is how you live your life and the people in your life. It was always a lovely reset.

I look upon the creature and see what it suffers to be useful to me. Thus, the brute beasts must die, must be roasted in the fire, and boiled, must come on to the plate, be hacked all in pieces, must be chewed in the mouth, and in the stomach turned to that which is loathsome, if one should behold it; and all to nourish me, to be useful to my body, and shall not I be willing to be made anything for God, for his service? What an abundance of alterations the creature undergoes to be made useful to me, to preserve me! Then, if God will do so with me for his use, as he subjects the creatures to me for my use, why should I not reset contented? If God will take away my wealth, and make me poor, if God will take away life, hack me to pieces, put me in prison-whatever he does, yet I shall not suffer more for God than the creature does for me. And surely I am infinitely more bound to God than the creature is to me, and there is not so much distance between me and the creature, as between me and God!

One of my favorite definitions of happiness comes from Sonja Lyubomirsky, a researcher whose team devotes their time to studying human happiness. Sonja says happiness is “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive wellbeing, combined with the sense that one's life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.

Growing up is terrifying. When you’re young, you have this feeling inside of you that you’ll eventually get the chance to do and try everything in life, because life looks so infinitely long from the perspective of a kid. Then suddenly, you realize that every choice you make unchooses all the other ones. This isn’t a video game. There’s no reset button and no infinite lives. Every single decision I make is permanent, and the more I make, the slimmer my path becomes in this shrinking, dark forest we call adulthood

Children of Babylon Early Marxists and Communists understood that to gain the hearts of a generation, seeds must be planted during childhood and early youth. The family of my Jewish-Israeli tour guide, Gideon Shor, originally lived in the Soviet Union. Gideon told me that prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Russia was a strong Christian nation. Communism needed to defeat the ideas of Christianity. His grandparents remember attending a public school where there were numerous Christian children. When the time came for lunch, the teacher asked the children to pray to God for food to appear. When they did, no food appeared. They were then asked to pray to “Father Stalin.” Those who did were amazed to see a cart of food, fruits, nuts, and candy roll through the classroom door. This was repeated daily, brainwashing the children into believing that Stalin and the Communist regime were the sole providers of their food. The youth living today are accepting radical ideologies that have totally failed. Multitudes who migrated to America from former Communist and Socialist nations are against both systems as they witnessed first-hand the oppression, government control, loss of freedoms, and hatred toward religion. Personal poverty, oppression, and a basic, simple life eventually rule in the majority of Socialist-Communist countries.

That night, I regarded myself in the full-length mirror in my London hotel room and marvelled at how my scars have faded and thought about the pots Eddie would sometimes make, then deliberately and carefully break, before resetting them with molten gold (so that he could sell them for much more money). At the time I thought this practice inauthentic and pretentious, but I am starting to look at some things in life in a different way. Kintsukuroi is the name for this ancient Japanese art, which teaches that broken objects are not something to hide away but should be displayed with pride, for they are stronger and more beautiful for surviving the breakage. I think I, too, am stronger and more beautiful for surviving my travails. The

Human lifetimes are time documented by time, employment is compensated by documented time for work; and the value of life is expensive. No one is wealthy enough to buy time for infinity...so why let them waste yours! #Studypeople who do not value the #expense of life & time...gain old, but common #wisdom. #Studypeople who value the expense of life & time...gain new but uncommon wisdom. Last year will never repeat in your #lifetime, neither will the New Year. Consider how you manage the #destiny #distraction of #timewasters... I reset my #NewYear clock with an alarm to signal the entry of expensive time wasters, so I can kindly show them back to the exit point. People who consciously care to connect their active purpose with others who value share them, are more likely to make most of time's expense, rather than waste time, as if forever could be spared.

The story really is short. Nine pages, about a boy who was born with a pair of wings. All his life, people tell him that this means he should try to fly. He’s afraid to. When he finally does, jumps off a two-story roof, he falls. He breaks his legs and wings. He never gets them reset. As he recovers, the bone heals in its misshapen form. Finally, people stop telling him that he must’ve been born to fly. Finally, he’s happy. When Alex comes back out, I’m crying. He asks me what’s wrong. I say, “I don’t know. It just speaks to me.” He thinks I’m making a joke and chuckles along, but for once, I wasn’t referencing the gallery girl who tried to sell us a twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear sculpture. I was thinking about what Julian used to say about art. How it either makes you feel something or it doesn’t. When I read his story, I started crying for a reason I can’t totally explain, not even to Alex. When I was a kid, I used to have these panic attacks thinking about how I could never be anyone else. I couldn’t be my mom or my dad, and for my whole life, I’d have to walk around inside a body that kept me from ever truly knowing anyone else. It made me feel lonely, desolate, almost hopeless. When I told my parents about this, I expected them to know the feeling I was talking about, but they didn’t. “That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with feeling that way, though, sweetie!” Mom insisted. “Who else do you think about being?” my dad said with his particular blunt fascination. The fear lessened, but the feeling never went away. Every once in a while, I’d roll it back out, poke at it. Wonder how I could ever stop feeling lonely when no one could ever know me all the way. When I could never peer into someone else’s brain and see it all. And now I’m crying because reading this story makes me feel for the first time that I’m not in my body. Like there’s some bubble that stretches around me and Alex and makes it so we’re just two different colored globs in a lava lamp, mixing freely, dancing around each other, unhindered. I’m crying because I’m relieved. Because I will never again feel as alone as I did during those long nights as a kid. As long as I have him, I will never be alone again.

Suggestions for Truthful Thinking Based on God’s Word I am chosen by God. (1 Peter 2:9) I am forgiven of my sins. (Ephesians 1:7) I am created to do the good work God has called me to do. (Ephesians 2:10) I am made new in Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:17) I can do what I need to do to thrive in this life through Christ who gives me strength. (Philippians 4:13) God will take care of all my needs. (Philippians 4:19) I have the power of the Holy Spirit. (Mark 16:17-18) I have access to the peace of God which surpasses understanding. (Philippians 4:7) I am born of God and able to conquer sin. (1 John 5:18) God has given me everything I need to live a godly life. (2 Peter 1:3-4) My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:19) God has delivered me from darkness. (Colossians 1:13) I am healed through Christ. (Isaiah 53:5) I am loved by God. (Ephesians 2:4) I am not ruled by fear. (2 Timothy 1:7) Take some time to search God’s Word for specific truths to battle your negative thinking.

I started wondering how many other parts of my life needed to be reexamined, reset, and redesigned. What other defaults was I accepting blindly, and how could I take charge?

Will this _______ help activate, grow and equip the kind of worshiper my Father is seeking?

Feelings?” Owen flipped a hand as if shaking off water. “I can talk about my feelings if you like. I was shaken to the core to discover I was a robot. I was dismayed to learn that my memories of an earlier life and of personal relationships were false. I was outraged and terrified at the prospect of being reset and reprinted—killed, essentially—just as you would be.

The lies are of a scale and of a nature that in modern political life I think you can only compare to Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has lied or can lie as casually and as cooly and as completely as Boris Johnson does - accept Boris Johnson. We have learned over the last few weeks that his closest colleagues thought he was diabolical. The cabinet secretary that Boris Johnson appointed because he would prove to be, or he was believed to be, a soft touch has described Boris Johnson as being utterly unfit for the job. The advisor that he brought in as a sort of mastermind - having overseen Brexit - Dominick Cummings has described Johnson in terms that you would reserve for your worst enemies. These are the people working closest by him. The only person who's had anything vaguely warm to say about him is Matt Hancock and let me tell you why. They've shaken hands on it. I'd bet my house on some sort of gentleman's... let's rephrase that... I'd bet my house on some sort of charlatan’s agreement behind the scenes that they won't slag each other off because everybody else is telling the truth about them - about Johnson and about Hancock. Hancock's uselessness facilitated and enabled by Johnson's uselessness, by Johnson's moral corruption effectively. And now the lies begin. 5,000 WhatsApp messages. ‘No idea. No, no, no, no idea. Don't know. Don't know technical people. Uh... factory reset. Don't know. Bleep, bleep.’ And then the classic: the flooding of the Zone. With so much manure that it's hard to know where to start. ‘We may have made mistakes’ is one of the latest statements to come out. Turns up 3 hours early so that he doesn't have to walk the gamut of people congregating to remember their lost loved ones and to share their feelings with the man that they consider to be partly responsible for their death. Absolutely extraordinary scenes, truly extraordinary scenes. How does he get away with it? Hugo Keith is a much tougher inquisitor than Lindsay flipping Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons. He's a much tougher inquisitor than any of the interviewers that Boris Johnson deigns to have his toes tickled by on a regular basis. He's a much tougher interviewer or scrutineer than the newspaper editors who have given him half a million pounds a year to write columns or already published articles about why he's the real victim in this story. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph today writing an article before Boris Johnson has given a single syllable of evidence, claiming that Boris Johnson is the real victim of this. I'd love him to go and read that out to the Covid families assembled outside the inquiry. And remember it was Daily Telegraph columnists and former editors that convened at the Club with Jacob Rees-Mogg and others to launch the Save Owen Paterson Society after another one of these charlatans was found to have breached parliamentary standards. Their response of course was not to advise their ally to accept the punishment that was coming his way but to attempt to get him off the hook and rip up the rule book under which he'd been found to be guilty.

My brothers and sisters, you are called to be so much more than a machine that spits out three to five popular worship songs on a Sunday morning. You were born to be so much more than a pretty voice or a skilled musician. You are called to be a house of prayer; a living, breathing, human being, who through the power of the cross and the spilled blood of Jesus, are now connected to God the Father and have become a walking encounter with His presence.

If it was a good movie, the experience felt like somebody was resetting a compass in my brain so I could feel what was important in life and what wasn’t.

know that my insecurities and the insecurities of others can bring about conflict in relationships. I don’t want that to happen. Help me be more secure and help my loved ones be more secure. Help me live my life as a model of someone firmly rooted in Your foundation. Lord, help me be a light for others. For it’s in the name of Jesus I pray. Amen.

I always hoped you'd outgrow the whole sibling-rivalry thing. Whatever it is that keeps you at each other's throats, I wish you'd both just let it go." "In all honesty, Mother, an apology would do wonders, but Bitsy has never apologized for anything in her entire life." She pauses, weighing her words. "People don't always say they're sorry, Lovey. You have to find a way to move on without it." Mother begins to make my bed, and I hurry to help. "Kind of hard to let something go when it's still happening." She draws her lips into a tight frown, as if I'm the greatest disappointment of her life. "You think you're the only one who has ever been hurt?" She snaps the pillow to fluff it in its case, clearly convinced her own pain far exceeds my own. "That's not what I'm saying." I place three pillow shams. She resets them. "Of course I'm not the only one who has ever been hurt. But it's a little different when you're betrayed by someone you love, and even worse when she does it on purpose. You don't know how that feels.

My greatest desire for you as you read this book is that Jesus would become your one and all-consuming desire. I pray that if there’s anything competing or taking the edge off of your desire for Him or if there’s any place in your heart where other things are starting to seduce and “dazzle” you more, that reading this book would be a moment of divine reset in your heart. I pray this journey will be the beginning of a new chapter in your life marked by greater purity and power.

As the Brother’s words sank in, John signed automatically, She’s not my female. “Yeah, she is. And the two of you make so much sense. You have no idea what kind of sense you make together.” John shook his head. Not sure who you’re talking about there. No offense. “Doesn’t have to be easy to be right.” In that case, we’re meant for each other. There was a long silence, during which John had the oddest sense that life was resetting itself, that the gears which had previously been slipping and missing had once more locked into place.

This doesn’t mean that tidying your room will actually calm your troubled mind. While it may help you feel refreshed temporarily, the relief won’t last because you haven’t addressed the true cause of your anxiety. If you let the temporary relief achieved by tidying up your physical space deceive you, you will never recognize the need to clean up your psychological space. This was true for me. Distracted by the “need” to tidy my room, it took me so long to get down to studying that my grades were always terrible. Let’s imagine a cluttered room. It does not get messy all by itself. You, the person who lives in it, makes the mess. There is a saying that “a messy room equals a messy mind.” I look at it this way. When a room becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical. Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue. If you can’t feel relaxed in a clean and tidy room, try confronting your feeling of anxiety. It may shed light on what is really bothering you. When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state. You can see any issues you have been avoiding and are forced to deal with them. From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life. As a result, your life will start to change. That’s why the task of putting your house in order should be done quickly. It allows you to confront the issues that are really important. Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.

The world can be a better place. The problems that plague are manmade. However, the people able to elevate human living, those few with the resources, influence, technology, time, and power, are preoccupied with something else, or they benefit from the status quo. Nothing else can explain their lack of action. Or perhaps, they lack the vision. If the latter is correct, the solution is simple, read my work. But if the former is so, which I think is true, then there is little hope for the common people. Unless of course, God intervenes and pushes the reset button to this video game called life. Or the people affected by the backwardness mobilize and retake their natural rights.

I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born.

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

After the second of two hospital stays following a difficult time, I went to a program for those whose lives have fallen apart. Often someone would say—weeping, shaking, or dry eyed—that he or she wished to go back in time and make everything right again. I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I

don’t think I’ve ever accomplished anything of value without asking for help both from God and from others. I’ve learned not to be afraid to admit that I can’t do it all on my own—because I’ve tried and failed numerous times in my life. The fear of asking limits us not only from accomplishment and success but from growth, from deeper intimacy with others, from trust, from vulnerability, and even from healing.