Someone Overlooked Quotes

You know the incredible thing about hearts is their unbelievable capacity for forgiveness. You’d be amazed what people will overlook when they love someone. (Acheron)

The only person that deserves a special place in your life is someone that never made you feel like you were an option in theirs.

When you focus on someone's disability you'll overlook their abilities, beauty and uniqueness. Once you learn to accept and love them for who they are, you subconsciously learn to love yourself unconditionally.

I knew from my own life experience that when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten minutes in a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for women, for minorities, for anyone society is quick to overlook.

It seems obvious, doesn't it, that someone who is ignored and overlooked will expand to the point where they have to be noticed, even if the noticing is fear and disgust.

There are so many things Blair doesn’t get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away—I now want to explain all these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.

When you know you’re worth loving, you can be a little imperfect. Hell, look at me—a lot imperfect. It makes all the difference in the world when you believe someone loves you enough that they don’t overlook the spot and the messed up hair. They just add it to the things about you that make them love you all the more.

Bullying is overlooked in the worst way. How much does a person have to endure before they break down mentally and spaz out, or before someone suffers a tragic loss?

I knew how to be a friend, a lover, a partner. I knew how to make someone feel cherished and seen and listened to -- everything I had myself always so desperately wanted and been afraid I might never have because I was so used to being overlooked.

I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There's no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.

Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be. I don't want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either.

Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

If you expect to be overlooked or forgotten, you’re always at least a little surprised when someone remembers you. You’re always outside understanding those strange creatures who actually expect people to remember and come back.

Never overlook the littlest things that can mean pure happiness to someone else.

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.' I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world." [Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]

St Michael’s RC secondary sat on a promontory overlooking the town of Auchenlea. The choice of site was an indirect consequence of a past mistake in vocational guidance, leading someone who had a pathological hatred of children into town planning, rather than the more traditional field of teaching.

I guess if you're really a friend, you overlook certain things. Its easy to be friends with someone who only says things you want to hear. I guess if you're really a friend, you have to cut a friend some slack.

As ever, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island are entirely overlooked. Mysteriously, the only time indigenous people are guaranteed a mainstream Amerikkan mention is on Thanksgiving. Again, to contextualize, this would be be kinda like someone busting into your house and robbing you blind, then sending you postcards once a year to remind you how much they are enjoying all of your stuff, and getting annoyed with you if you don't respond with appreciation for their thoughtfulness.

The bond between husband and wife is a strong one. Suppose the man had hunted her out and brought her back. The memory of her acts would still be there, and inevitably, sooner or later, it would be cause for rancor. When there are crises, incidents, a woman should try to overlook them, for better or for worse, and make the bond into something durable. The wounds will remain, with the woman and with the man, when there are crises such as I have described. It is very foolish for a woman to let a little dalliance upset her so much that she shows her resentment openly. He has his adventures--but if he has fond memories of their early days together, his and hers, she may be sure that she matters. A commotion means the end of everything. She should be quiet and generous, and when something comes up that quite properly arouses her resentment she should make it known by delicate hints. The man will feel guilty and with tactful guidance he will mend his ways. Too much lenience can make a woman seem charmingly docile and trusting, but it can also make her seem somewhat wanting in substance. We have had instances enough of boats abandoned to the winds and waves. It may be difficult when someone you are especially fond of, someone beautiful and charming, has been guilty of an indiscretion, but magnanimity produces wonders. They may not always work, but generosity and reasonableness and patience do on the whole seem best.

But I have discovered that if you love someone the way I love Mew, you learn to overlook the disgusting things.

I knew from my own life experience that when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten minutes in a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for women, for minorities, for anyone society is quick to overlook.

There is a secret about human love that is commonly overlooked: Receiving it is much more scary and threatening than giving it. How many times in your life have you been unable to let in someone’s love or even pushed it away? Much as we proclaim the wish to be truly loved, we are often afraid of that, and so find it difficult to open to love or let it all the way in.

He's not exactly a stranger anymore. He showed Jack how to do a backflip. Someone tipped sand down his shirt. He gave Moxie a leg up over the chain fence on the way home. He's eaten their potato salad and worn their clothes. The trouble is he stole it all, every moment. And that's the part people don't overlook. They feel betrayed. Betrayed people have the hardest fists.

It’s hard to let go, especially after you’ve invested a few years. It’s hard to let go of who we imagined someone else was too. You loved him so you overlooked all the thing that were obvious to everyone around you. We all do it.

Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?" Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. "Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined." "But surely there's something more to it than that." "It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once." De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?" The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next. "Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-" "No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling." De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise. "Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'" The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance. He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.

I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead. During which the question remained open. During which the denouement had yet to play out. During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the East River. During which the bells would not necessarily sound and the doors would not necessarily be locked at six. During which the last dialogue heard did not necessarily need to concern the vent. Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it.

I feel about Olenka the way I think God might. I know so much about her. Nothing has been hidden from me. It’s rare, in the real world, that I get to know someone so completely. I’ve known her in so many modes: a happy young newlywed and a lonely old lady; a rosy, beloved darling and an overlooked, neglected piece of furniture, nearly a local joke; a nurturing wife and an overbearing false mother. And look at that: the more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment. Some essential mercy in me has been switched on. What God has going for Him that we don’t is infinite information. Maybe that’s why He’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.

It's always just a matter of what someone is willing to see and what someone is willing to ignore. I think we are all guilty of overlooking things if it suits our own agenda. But whenever we do, we are always setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Humanity knows not to take big things for granted. We understand the importance of loved ones, health, acceptance, but what about the billion other elements that define who we are? Big we see. For big, we toss and turn at night, fearing big loss. And yet, the little things we overlook. Forgetting to savour life’s details, such as the taste of fresh scones or the scent of books opened for the first time, is our greatest deprivation. Such pleasures are not subject to change. However, we change. Our hearts break, and pastries lose their flavour. Love dies, and our senses dull. By losing a big thing, we lose all the littles by default.

I stood for a time, overlooking the calm sea. Under the bright morning sun, it looked like hammered blue metal. A very light breeze came off it and stirred my hair. I felt as if someone had spoken words aloud to me and I echoed them. “Time for a change.” p. 103

Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable only for communication with other persons. We talk to people; we do not speak to the ground underfoot. We've largely forgotten the incantatory and invocational use of speech as a way of bringing ourselves into deeper rapport with the beings around us, or of calling the living land into resonance with us. It is a power we still brush up against whenever we use our words to bless and to curse, or to charm someone we're drawn to. But we wield such eloquence only to sway other people, and so we miss the greater magnetism, the gravitational power that lies within such speech. The beaver gliding across the pond, the fungus gripping a thick trunk, a boulder shattered by its tumble down a cliff or the rain splashing upon those granite fragments -- we talk about such beings, the weather and the weathered stones, but we do not talk to them. Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, we've overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. We've lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us.

So many people overlook the small things. The way someone's laugh makes you smile. The way their eyes can captivate you. How the way they speak can enlighten you, encourage you, inspire you. A touch of their hand to yours. A quick kiss on the cheek. An 'I love you.

The Christian answer to this is that no two people are compatible. Duke University ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas has famously made this point:   Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is . . . learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.40

It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him.

She had thought about how everywhere in that place Romans had written the local people out of their history. She was trying to figure out how people valued a thing, what made something revered while other things were overlooked. Who decided what was out with the old, what had to have a replacement? What traditions stayed and what tools, household items, art, things, evidence of someone, languages, fell away. But when she tried to draw a vague line to the artefacts of Prosperous she was stumped — why the artefacts of Middlesbrough were important and not those from home.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.

For it is indeed pointless and foolish to seek to get from another what one can get from oneself. [32] Since I can get greatness of soul and nobility of mind from myself, shall I seek to get a patch of land from you, or a bit of money, or some public post? Heaven forbid! I won’t overlook my own resources in such a manner. [33] But if someone is abject and cowardly, what on earth can one do for him except write letters for him as though on behalf of a corpse, ‘Do please grant us the corpse of this man and a pint of his miserable blood’; [34] for in truth such a person is merely a corpse and a pint of blood, and nothing more. If he amounted to anything more, he would realize that no one suffers misfortune because of the actions of another.

Justin: I am falling so in love with you. Her body electrified. Celeste wiped her eyes and read his text again. The drone of the plane disappeared; the turbulence was no more. There was only Justin and his words. Justin: I lose myself and find myself at the same time with you. Justin: I need you, Celeste. I need you as part of my world, because for the first time, I am connected to someone in a way that has meaning. And truth. Maybe our distance has strengthened what I feel between us since we’re not grounded in habit or daily convenience. We have to fight for what we have. Justin: I don’t know if I can equate what I feel for you with anything else. Except maybe one thing, if this makes any sense. Justin: I go to this spot at Sunset Cliffs sometimes. It’s usually a place crowded with tourists, but certain times of year are quieter. I like it then. And there’s a high spot on the sandstone cliff, surrounded by this gorgeous ice plant, and it overlooks the most beautiful water view you’ve ever seen. I’m on top of the world there, it seems. Justin: And everything fits, you know? Life feels right. As though I could take on anything, do anything. And sometimes, when I’m feeling overcome with gratitude for the view and for what I have, I jump so that I remember to continue to be courageous because not every piece of life will feel so in place. Justin: It’s a twenty-foot drop, the water is only in the high fifties, and it’s a damn scary experience. But it’s a wonderful fear. One that I know I can get through and one that I want. Justin: That’s what it’s like with you. I am scared because you are so beyond anything I could have imagined. I become so much more with you beside me. That’s terrifying, by the way. But I will be brave because my fear only comes from finally having something deeply powerful to lose. That’s my connection with you. It would be a massive loss. Justin: And now I am in the car and about to see you, so don’t reply. I’m too flipping terrified to hear what you think of my rant. It’s hard not to pour my heart out once I start. If you think I’m out of mind, just wave your hands in horror when you spot the lovesick guy at the airport. Ten minutes went by. He had said not to reply, so she hadn’t. Justin: Let’s hope I don’t get pulled over for speeding… but I’m at a stoplight now. Justin: God, I hope you aren’t… aren’t… something bad. Celeste: Hey, Justin? Justin: I TOLD YOU NOT TO REPLY! Justin: I know, I know. But I’m happy you did because I lost it there for a minute. Celeste: HEY, JUSTIN? Justin: Sorry… Hey, Celeste? Celeste: I am, unequivocally and wholly falling in love with you, too. Justin: Now I’m definitely speeding. I will see you soon.

CHAPTER NINETEEN OUTSIDE 217 Danny was remembering the words of someone else who had worked at the Overlook during the season: Her saying she’d seen something in one of the rooms where … a bad thing happened. That was in Room 217 and I want you to promise me you won’t go in there, Danny … steer right clear …

First, there is the burden of pride. The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through the years and the burden will become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them. Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to His rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort. He develops toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, "Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to care what men think.

Much as in life, if you like someone, you’ll tend to overlook their flaws. You’ll find signals from a love interest—or a spacecraft—even when they’re not sending any.

Everyone you come in contact with knows a person who runs or owns a business. Make sure they know what you do, so when the time comes, you get the call, not someone else.

I have nothing to do with him,” L said. “To be completely accurate, I do not even know B. He is simply someone I am aware of. But none of this affects my judgment. Certainly, I was interested in this case, and began to investigate it because I knew who the killer was. But that did not alter the way I investigated it, or the manner in which my investigation proceeded. Naomi Misora, I cannot overlook evil. I cannot forgive it. It does not matter if I know the person who commits evil or not. I am only interested in justice.” “Only... in justice…” Misora gasped. “Then... nothing else matters?” “I wouldn’t say that, but it is not a priority.” “You won’t forgive any evil, no matter what the evil is?” “I wouldn’t say that, but it is not a priority.” “But...” Like a thirteen-year-old victim. “There are people who justice cannot save.” Like a thirteen-year old criminal. “And there are people who evil can save.” “There are. But even so,” L said, his tone not changing at all, as if gently admonishing Naomi Misora. “Justice has more power than anything else.” “Power? By power... you mean strength?” “No. I mean kindness.” He said it so easily.

I didn't have a choice." "Are you saying...What are you saying?" Is he...could he be talking about me? He runs a hand through his hair. I've never seen him this emotional before. He's always so controlled, so sure of himself. "I'm saying you're what I want, Emma. I'm saying I'm in love with you." He steps forward and lifts his hand to my cheek, blazing a line of fire with his fingertips as they trace down to my mouth. "How do you think it would make me feel to see you with Grom?" he whispers. "Like someone ripped my heart out and put it through Rachel's meat grinder, that's how. Probably worse. It would probably kill me. Emma, please don't cry." I throw my hands in the air. "Don't cry? Are you serious? Why did you come here, Galen? Did you think it would make me feel better to know that you do love me, but that it still won't work out? That I still have to mate with Grom for the greater good? Don't you tell me not to cry, Galen! I...c...c...can't h...h...help-" The waterworks soak me. Galen looks at me, hands by his side, helpless as a trapped crab. I'm bordering on hyperventilation, and pretty soon I'll start hiccupping. This is too much. His expression is so severe, it looks like he's in physical pain. "Emma," he breathes. "Emma, does this mean you feel the same way? Do you care for me at all?" I laugh, but it sounds sharper than I intended, because of a hiccup. "What does it matter how I feel, Galen? I think we pretty much covered why. No need to rehash things, right?" "It matters, Emma." He grabs my hand and pulls me to him again. "Tell me right now. Do you care for me?" "If you can't tell that I'm stupid in love with you, Galen, then you aren't a very good ambassador for the hum-" His mouth covers mine, cutting me off. This kiss isn't gentle like the first one. It's definitely not sweet. It's rough, demanding, searching. And disorienting. There's not a part of me that isn't melting against Galen, not a part that isn't combusting with his fevered touch. I accidentally moan into his lips. He takes it for his cue to lift me off my feet, to pull me up to his height for more leverage. I take his groan for my cue to kiss him harder. He ignores his cell phone ringing in his pocket. I ignore the rest of the universe. Even when headlights approach, I'm willing to overlook their intrusion and keep kissing. But, prince that he is, Galen is a little more refined than me at this moment. He gently pries his lips from mine and sets me down. His smile is both intoxicated and intoxicating. "We still need to talk." "Right," I say, but I'm shaking my head. He laughs. "I didn't come all the way to Atlantic City to make you cry." "I'm not crying." I lean into him again. He doesn't refuse my lips, but he doesn't do them justice either, planting a measly little kiss on them before stepping back.

Please take heart. You don’t have to jockey for a position. You don’t have to fight for approval. You don’t need someone else’s celebration of you. You don’t need someone else to fail for you to succeed. The anointing that has your name on it, the calling, the gift that has your name on it, is irreversible and irrevocable. Your job is to be faithful, and everything with your name on it will get to you.

And His Word can come through the trees like wind. “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was homeless and you gave me a room, I was shivering and you gave me clothes, I was sick and you stopped to visit, I was in prison and you came to me . . . I’m telling the solemn truth: Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me—you did it to me.”3

It doesn't take someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure. Again, we're wired to. And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language.

The doors burst open, startling me awake. I nearly jumped out of bed. Tove groaned next to me, since I did this weird mind-slap thing whenever I woke up scared, and it always hit him the worst. I'd forgotten about it because it had been a few months since the last time it happened. "Good morning, good morning, good morning," Loki chirped, wheeling in a table covered with silver domes. "What are you doing?" I asked, squinting at him. He'd pulled up the shades. I was tired as hell, and I was not happy. "I thought you two lovebirds would like breakfast," Loki said. "So I had the chef whip you up something fantastic." As he set up the table in the sitting area, he looked over at us. "Although you two are sleeping awfully far apart for newlyweds." "Oh, my god." I groaned and pulled the covers over my head. "You know, I think you're being a dick," Tove told him as he got out of bed. "But I'm starving. So I'm willing to overlook it. This time." "A dick?" Loki pretended to be offended. "I'm merely worried about your health. If your bodies aren't used to strenuous activities, like a long night of lovemaking, you could waste away if you don't get plenty of protein and rehydrate. I'm concerned for you." "Yes, we both believe that's why you're here," Tove said sarcastically and took a glass of orange juice that Loki had poured for him. "What about you, Princess?" Loki's gaze cut to me as he filled another glass. "I'm not hungry." I sighed and sat up. "Oh, really?" Loki arched an eyebrow. "Does that mean that last night-" "It means that last night is none of your business," I snapped. I got up and hobbled over to Elora's satin robe, which had been left on a nearby chair. My feet and ankles ached from all the dancing I'd done the night before. "Don't cover up on my account," Loki said as I put on the robe. "You don't have anything I haven't seen." "Oh, I have plenty you haven't seen," I said and pulled the robe around me. "You should get married more often," Loki teased. "It makes you feisty." I rolled my eyes and went over to the table. Loki had set it all up, complete with a flower in a vase in the center, and he'd pulled off the domed lids to reveal a plentiful breakfast. I took a seat across from Tove, only to realize that Loki had pulled up a third chair for himself. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Well, I went to all the trouble of having someone prepare it, so I might as well eat it." Loki sat down and handed me a flute filled with orange liquid. "I made mimosas." "Thanks," I said, and I exchanged a look with Tove to see if it was okay if Loki stayed. "He's a dick," Tove said over a mouthful of food, and shrugged. "But I don't care." In all honesty, I think we both preferred having Loki there. He was a buffer between the two of us so we didn't have to deal with any awkward morning-after conversations. And though I'd never admit it aloud, Loki made me laugh, and right now I needed a little levity in my life. "So, how did everyone sleep last night?" Loki asked. There was a quick knock at the bedroom doors, but they opened before I could answer. Finn strode inside, and my stomach dropped. He was the last person I'd expected to see. I didn't even think he would be here anymore. After the other night I assumed he'd left, especially when I didn't see him at the wedding. "Princess, I'm sorry-" Finn started to say as he hurried in, but then he saw Loki and stopped abruptly. "Finn?" I asked, stunned. Finn looked appalled and pointed at Loki. "What are you doing here?" "I'm drinking a mimosa." Loki leaned back in his chair. "What are you doing here?" "What is he doing here?" Finn asked, turning his attention to me. "Never mind him." I waved it off. "What's going on?" "See, Finn, you should've told me when I asked," Loki said between sips of his drink.

Loving someone to the threshold of marriage doesn't mean the difficulties of life are suddenly going to disappear. You're both going to do a lot of forgiving and overlooking each other's faults over the years if you truly want a happy marriage.

People often overlook the profound intimacy which can be felt by performing the smallest acts for someone they love. Never underestimate the energy that can be felt by simply sharing the same space with your soulmate. It is that electricity between two people that causes time to cease to exist.

Higher purpose: I am here to serve. I am here to inspire. I am here to love. I am here to live my truth. Communion: I will appreciate someone who doesn’t know that I feel that way. I will overlook the tension and be friendly to someone who has ignored me. I will express at least one feeling that has made me feel guilty or embarrassed. Awareness: I will spend ten minutes observing instead of speaking. I will sit quietly by myself just to sense how my body feels. If someone irritates me, I will ask myself what I really feel beneath the anger—and I won’t stop paying attention until the anger is gone. Acceptance: I will spend five minutes thinking about the best qualities of someone I really dislike. I will read about a group that I consider totally intolerant and try to see the world as they do. I will look in the mirror and describe myself exactly as if I were the perfect mother or father I wish I had had (beginning with the sentence “How beautiful you are in my eyes”). Creativity: I will imagine five things I could do that my family would never expect—and then I will do at least one of them. I will outline a novel based on my life (every incident will be true, but no one would ever guess that I am the hero). I will invent something in my mind that the world desperately needs. Being: I will spend half an hour in a peaceful place doing nothing except feeling what it is like to exist. I will lie outstretched on the grass and feel the earth languidly revolving under me. I will take in three breaths and let them out as gently as possible. Efficiency: I will let at least two things out of my control and see what happens. I will gaze at a rose and reflect on whether I could make it open faster or more beautifully than it already does—then I will ask if my life has blossomed this efficiently. I will lie in a quiet place by the ocean, or with a tape of the sea, and breathe in its rhythms. Bonding: When I catch myself looking away from someone, I will remember to look into the person’s eyes. I will bestow a loving gaze on someone I have taken for granted. I will express sympathy to someone who needs it, preferably a stranger. Giving: I will buy lunch and give it to someone in need on the street (or I will go to a café and eat lunch with the person). I will compliment someone for a quality that I know the individual values in him- or herself. I will give my children as much of my undivided time today as they want. Immortality: I will read a scripture about the soul and the promise of life after death. I will write down five things I want my life to be remembered for. I will sit and silently experience the gap between breathing in and breathing out, feeling the eternal in the present moment.

People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and because of that, all the more exhilarating.... I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration.... I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range... I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone's life.

In our saddest moments, we want to be held by or feel connected to someone who has known that same ache, even if what caused it is completely different. We don’t want our sadness overlooked or diminished by someone who can’t tolerate what we’re feeling because they’re unwilling or unable to own their own sadness.

It’s a lonely business, and then sometimes strangely claustrophobic, but this is it. This is what I wanted and what Liz was pulled away from, against her every fiber. This abstract performance art called Family Life is our one run at the ultimate improv. Our chance to be great for someone, to give another person enough of what they need to be happy. Ours to overlook or lose track of or bemoan, ours to recommit to, to apologize for, to try again for. Ours to watch disappear into their next self—toddler to tyke, tween to teen—ours to drop off somewhere and miss forever. It’s happening right now, whether we attend to it or not.

The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the “fault” that you perceive in another isn’t even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself. Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.

But it’s no surprise that when someone truly awful dies, the cool break out in reverence. Which is what happened when Hugo Chávez croaked. On that day in March 2013, we saw a parade of misty-eyed celebrities and solemn left-wing hacks paying tribute to a dead guy. Out of the woodwork came a parade of Hugoslavians, tyrant-lovers who could overlook the heathen’s badness for the sake of coolness. See, someone can be truly evil. But if that person runs a country and you know that person well, it makes you kinda cool. It’s better to know Darth Vader than Doris Day. It’s pretty cool to brag that you just shared a burrito with a murderous despot, as opposed to a biscuit with Billy Graham. And so when Chávez bit the dust, who did we see? Sean Penn. Oliver Stone. Jimmy Carter. Joe Kennedy. All decorating the corpse with wreaths of blithering blather. And no one blathers blitheringly like that quartet. That’s the worst set of four since the last Who reunion.

He misses her. He miser her, he misses her, he misses her. ...Seven miserable lonely days of missing someone he never should have been with in the first place, yet wanting her back even so. He wonders if he could overlook her lack of human sympathy and generalized air of bitterness, just so he could have the feeling of being together again.

LA CHAPELLE. 92ND DIVISION. TED. (September, 1918) This lonely beautiful word means church and it is quiet here; the stone walls curve like slow water. It’s Sunday and I’m standing on the bitter ridge of France, overlooking the war. La Guerre is asleep. This morning early on patrol we slipped down through the mist and scent of burning woodchips (somewhere someone was warm) into Moyenmoutier… a cloister of flushed brick and a little river braiding its dark hair. Back home in Louisiana the earth is red, but it suckles you until you can sing yourself grown. Here, even the wind has edges. Drizzle splintered around us; we stood on the arched bridge and thought for a moment of the dead we had left behind in the valley, in the terrible noise.

Wallingford vaulted up from his chair. “You’ve come here so that I can mollify you and share in your belittling of Anais? Well, you’ve knocked on the wrong bloody door, Raeburn, because I will not join you in disparaging Anais. I will not! Not when I know what sort of woman she is—she is better than either of us deserves. Damn you, I know what she means to you. I know how you’ve suffered. You want her and you’re going to let a mistake ruin what you told me only months ago you would die for. Ask yourself if it is worth it. Is your pride worth all the pain you will make your heart suffer through? Christ,” Wallingford growled, “if I had a woman who was willing to overlook everything I’d done in my life, every wrong deed I had done to her or others, I would be choking back my pride so damn fast I wouldn’t even taste it.” Lindsay glared at Wallingford, galled by the fact his friend— the one person on earth he believed would understand his feelings—kept chastising him for his anger, which, he believed, was natural and just. “If I had someone like Anais in my life,” Wallingford continued, blithely ignoring Lindsay’s glares, “I would ride back to Bewdley with my tail between my legs and I would do whatever I had to do in order to get her back.” “You’re a goddamned liar! You’ve never been anything but a selfish prick!” Lindsay thundered. “What woman would you deign to lower yourself in front of? What woman could you imagine doing anything more to than fucking?” Wallingford’s right eye twitched and Lindsay wondered if his friend would plant his large fist into his face. He was mad enough for it, Lindsay realized, but so, too, was he. He was mad, angry—all but consumed with rage, but the bluster went out of him when Wallingford spoke. “I’ve never bothered to get to know the women I’ve been with. Perhaps if I had, I would have found one I could have loved—one I could have allowed myself to be open with. But out of the scores of women I’ve pleasured, I’ve only ever been the notorious, unfeeling and callous libertine—that is my shame.Your shame is finding that woman who would love you no matter what and letting her slip through your fingers because she is not the woman your mind made her out to be. You have found something most men only dream of. Things that I have dreamed of and coveted for myself. The angel is dead. It is time to embrace the sinner, for if you do not, I shall expect to see you in hell with me. And let me inform you, it’s a burning, lonely place that once it has its hold on you, will never let you go. Think twice before you allow pride to rule your heart.” “What do you know about love and souls?” Lindsay growled as he stalked to the study door. “I know that a soul is something I don’t have, and love,” Wallingford said softly before he downed the contents of his brandy, “love is like ghosts, something that everyone talks of but few have seen. You are one of the few who have seen it and sometimes I hate you for it. If I were you, I’d think twice about throwing something like that away, but of course, I’m a selfish prick and do as I damn well please.” “You do indeed.” Wallingford’s only response was to raise his crystal glass in a mock salute.“To hell,” he muttered,“make certain you bring your pride. It is the only thing that makes the monotony bearable.

Hardly had Juana had time to get settled when there was a clatter in the courtyard. The night sprang into excitement; instructions were shouted, torches brought. And suddenly the doors burst open; suddenly Philip -- hot, handsome, disheveled -- strode in. Philip was blond and sturdy; the gunpowder-train of Juana's emotions, long and dark and twisting, exploded at last. Philip's eyes must have seen, if nothing else, a girl in virginal flush, a young body of sixteen. He could hardly endure the formal presentations of the nobles. As soon as they were ended, he did what is generally referred to as commanding the nearest cleric to marry them on the spot. This person, however -- the Spaniard don Diego Villaescusa, Dean of Jaen -- it was not in Philip's power to order about. But the fact that it must have been Juana who gave the command only serves to underline the mutuality of their haste and hunger. The Dean did as he was bidden; the ignited youngsters kneeled; Philip hurried Juana out. In a room on the rez de chaussee overlooking the turbulent river they tore off their clothes. Someone had managed to get a gilded crucifix nailed on the ceiling above the bed -- surely one of the unnoticed ornaments (and, as things turned out, one of the most inappropriate) ever put up.

The reason that people find it so difficult to enter a healing relationship is that life in our family of origin often required a good deal of unawareness. We overlook what we don’t want to see; we keep silent about things that are too difficult to discuss; we respect boundaries even when they put someone into a box. In short, the family is where we learn to deny pain. And denied pain is just another term for suffering. Given

The space cadet: ADHD’s predominantly inattentive presentation Probably the most misunderstood and overlooked version of ADHD is the primarily inattentive presentation (ADHD-I). Someone presenting this way will have a much harder time staying focused and might be prone to making careless mistakes in their work. Unless they find a task super engaging, it might be difficult or even impossible for them to keep their attention homed

She never murdered anyone. She didn't want to destroy the world. But I think there's another sort of evil that is often overlooked ... and it is this. Granny never did anything to help anyone else. She was rich and healthy (she lived into her nineties) but she was utterly selfish and complained all the time. ... As far as I know, she never tried to make anyone happy ... and if you ask me, evil is a perfectly reasonable description of someone like that.

He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel insecure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody's tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

When someone wrongs you, ask yourself: What made him do it? Once you understand his concept of good and evil, you'll feel sorry for him and cease to either be amazed or angry. If his concept is similar to yours, then you will be bound to forgive him since you would have acted as he did in similar circumstances. But if you do not share his ideas of good and evil, then you should find it even easier to overlook the wrongs of someone who is confused and in a moral muddle".

The edge of something mostly buried in the sand caught the sun, and I bent to pick up a pearl nautilus. Simple and uncomplicatedly lovely, a pearl nautilus whispered its beauty. It wasn’t showy like a cameo or frog shell, with their twists and nubs and variations. It never competed for attention, but it held and reflected a prism of light that perfectly complimented its surroundings. Someone else may have overlooked a pearl nautilus, but I preferred it. - Nicole Abbot (Whisper of Light)

When people say things that we find offensive, civic charity asks that we resist the urge to attribute to immorality or prejudice views that can be equally well explained by other motives. It asks us to give the benefit of doubts, the assumption of goodwill, and the gift of attention. When people say things that agree with or respond thoughtfully to our arguments, we acknowledge that they have done so. We compliment where we can do so honestly, and we praise whatever we can legitimately find praiseworthy in their beliefs and their actions. When we argue with a forgiving affection, we recognize that people are often carried away by passions when discussing things of great importance to them. We overlook slights and insults and decline to respond in kind. We apologize when we get something wrong or when we hurt someone's feelings, and we allow others to apologize to us when they do the same. When people don't apologize, we still don't hold grudges or hurt them intentionally, even if we feel that they have intentionally hurt us. If somebody is abusive or obnoxious, we may decline to participate in further conversation, but we don't retaliate or attempt to make them suffer. And we try really hard not to give in to the overwhelming feeling that arguments must be won - and opponents destroyed - if we want to protect our own status or sense of worth. We never forget that our opponents are human beings who possess innate dignity and fellow citizens who deserve respect.

Anyone who might feel reluctant to surrender his will to the will of another should remember Jesus' words, "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin." We must of necessity be servant to someone, either to God or to sin. The sinner prides himself on his independence, completely overlooking the fact that he is the weak slave of the sins that rule his members. The man who surrenders to Christ exchanges a cruel slave driver for a kind and gentle Master whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.

She would not last a minute in the kind of life we lead." "You might be surprised at the strength of the fragile. And for some people, it is ordinary life that is most challenging, not do much the extraordinary." In a way, Livia's greatest strength was that she was so overlooked and underestimated. Within seconds people decided who she was, and what she was and wasn't capable of. But no one was so easy to sum up, least of all a someone like Livia, who yearned to be more with every fiber of her being.

We listen to rap lyrics, but few study the history. One of the most significant contributions of hip hop. It offers a profound social commentary on the black experience. This is an aspect of the music that is overlooked because most people choose to pay more attention to “the hook” (the catchy repetitive phrase) than the complete body of work. In doing so, the listener misses the message: the essence of the music, the breakdown of the bars. That’s tantamount to someone who is able to quote scripture, but has never read the bible.

The lanterns become small suns burning in the distance and I can believe, just for a moment, that all of us people are wandering the universe together as one. One of the truths we often overlook is that we are, all of us, always wandering the universe. We are perpetually hurtling on a rocky raft through the void, taking the tour of the cosmos at 67,000 miles per hour, every second of every day, and yet we still find time to stop and talk over bridges in the late hours of the night and maybe reach out and touch someone else's hand.

After a day filled with talking, laughing, reminiscing and making future plans, Evie had returned to Eversby Priory in high spirits. She was full of news to share with her husband... including the fact that the protagonist of Daisy's current novel in progress had been partly inspired by him. "I had the idea when the subject of your husband came up at a dinner party a few months ago, Evie," Daisy had explained, dabbing at a tiny stain left by a strawberry that had fallen onto her bodice. "Someone remarked that Kingston was still the handsomest man in England, and how unfair it was that he never ages. And Lillian said he must be a vampire, and everyone laughed. It started me thinking about that old novel The Vampyre, published about fifty years ago. I decided to write something similar, only a romantic version." Lillian had shaken her head at the notion. "I told Daisy no one would want to read about a vampire lover. Blood... teeth..." She grimaced and shivered. "He enslaves women with his charismatic power," Daisy protested. "He's also a rich, handsome duke- just like Evie's husband." Annabelle spoke then, her blue eyes twinkling. "In light of all that, one could forgive a bad habit or two." Lillian gave her a skeptical glance. "Annabelle, could you really overlook a husband who went around sucking the life out of people?" After pondering the question, Annabelle asked Daisy, "How rich is he?" She ducked with a smothered laugh as Lillian pelted her with a biscuit. Laughing at her friends' antics, Evie had asked Daisy, "What's the title?" "The Duke's Deadly Embrace." "I suggested The Duke Was a Pain in the Neck," Lillian had said, "but Daisy thought it lacked romance.

A masquerade is supposed to be a chance to put on a different face, isn't it? An opportunity to be someone else for a few hours. Yet I can't seem to manage it. I'm still me, beneath the mask." "I know what you mean." Gabe was still himself beneath the armor, too. An interloper among the aristocrats. Unwelcome. Inadequate. "We are who we are, I suppose." "We are who we are," she agreed. Gabe despised the defeated note in her voice. He liked who she was, beneath the mask. And when he was in her company, he almost liked who he was, too. The idea that anyone would overlook her made him vaguely furious.

It’s a lonely business, and then sometimes strangely claustrophobic, but this is it. This is what I wanted and what Liz was pulled away from, against her every fiber. This abstract performance art called Family Life is our one run at the ultimate improv. Our chance to be great for someone, to give another person enough of what they need to be happy. Ours to overlook or lose track of or bemoan, ours to recommit to, to apologize for, to try again for. Ours to watch disappear into their next self—toddler to tyke, tween to teen—ours to drop off somewhere and miss forever. It’s happening right now, whether we attend to it or not. Like after preparing a nutritious meal that no one really liked and a lot of blame-gaming over who forgot to take out the compost, your peevish, greasy “young adult” tramps off to take the shower she should have taken two days ago and the evening is shot to shit and not one minute of it looked like the thing you prayed for so long ago, but then you hear something. You head up the stairs, hover outside the bathroom door. “All the single ladies, all the single ladies…” — The kid is singing in the shower. Your profoundly ordinary kid is singing in the shower and you get to be here to hear it.

The three thousand miles in distance he put between himself and Emma tonight is nothing compared with the enormous chasm separating them when they sit next to each other in calculus. Emma's ability to overlook his existence is a gift-but not one that Poseidon handed down. Rachel insists this gift is uniquely a female trait, regardless of the species. Since their breakup, Emma seems to be the only female utilizing this particular gift. Even Rayna could learn a few lessons from Emma in the art of torturing a smitten male. Smitten? More like fanatical. He shakes his head in disgust. Why couldn't I just sift when I turned of age? Why couldn't I find a suitable mild-tempered female to mate with? Live a peaceful life, produce offspring, grow old, and watch my own fingerlings have fingerlings someday? He searches through his mind for someone he might have missed in the past. For a face he overlooked before but could now look forward to every day. For a docile female who would be honored to mate with a Triton prince-instead of a temperamental siren who mocks his title at every opportunity. He scours his memory for a sweet-natured Syrena who would take care of him, who would do whatever he asked, who would never argue with him. Not some human-raised snippet who stomps her foot when she doesn't get her way, listens to him only when it suits some secret purpose she has, or shoves a handful of chocolate mints down his throat if he lets his guard down. Not some white-haired angelfish whose eyes melt him into a puddle, whose blush is more beautiful than sunrise, and whose lips send heat ripping through him like a mine explosion. He sighs as Emma's face eclipses hundreds of mate-worthy Syrena. That's just one more quality I'll have to add to the list: someone who won't mind being second best. His just locks as he catches a glimpse of his shadow beneath him, cast by slithers of sterling moonlight. Since it's close to three a.m. here, he's comfortable walking around without the inconvenience of clothes, but sitting on the rocky shore in the raw is less than appealing. And it doesn't matter which Jersey shore he sits on, he can't escape the moon that connects them both-and reminds him of Emma's hair. Hovering in the shallows, he stares up at it in resentment, knowing the moon reminds him of something else he can' escape-his conscience. If only he could shirk his responsibilities, his loyalty to his family, his loyalty to his people. If only he could change everything about himself, he could steal Emma away and never look back-that is, if she'll ever talk to him again.

Hobbies provide more examples. If you are a gardener, what you see when you visit Sissinghurst Castle is different from what a non-gardener sees. Your judgment of the quality of the garden has an element of the objective that goes beyond sentiments about how pretty the flowers are. If you are a stamp collector, the reasons you value a particular stamp involve aspects of it that someone who isn’t a stamp collector overlooks. If you are an oenophile, your judgment of the quality of a wine has an element of the objective that goes beyond sentiments of how good it tastes. Expertise changes the quality of the experience, and also introduces an element of the objective.

Sensitive But Unclassified” cable to Washington titled “A KEY STRATEGIC TIPPING-POINT GAME-CHANGER.” It posited: The primary challenge in Afghanistan has become the ability to get fidelity on the problem set. Secondarily, we need to shape the battlefield and dial it in. Whether or not we can add this to a stairway to heaven remains to be seen, but the importance of double tapping it cannot be overlooked. After getting smart so that we do not lose the bubble, the long pole in the tent needs to be identified. Once we have pinned the rose on someone, then we must send them downrange. Then we must define the delta so it can be lashed up. This can be difficult, as there are a lot of moving parts; in the end, it is all about delivery.

inspire. I am here to love. I am here to live my truth. Communion: I will appreciate someone who doesn’t know that I feel that way. I will overlook the tension and be friendly to someone who has ignored me. I will express at least one feeling that has made me feel guilty or embarrassed. Awareness: I will spend ten minutes observing instead of speaking. I will sit quietly by myself just to sense how my body feels. If someone irritates me, I will ask myself what I really feel beneath the anger—and I won’t stop paying attention until the anger is gone. Acceptance: I will spend five minutes thinking about the best qualities of someone I really dislike. I will read about a group that I consider totally intolerant and try to see the world as they do. I will look in the mirror and describe myself exactly as if I were the perfect mother or father I wish I had had (beginning with the sentence “How beautiful you are in my eyes”). Creativity: I will imagine five things I could do that my family would never expect—and then I will do at least one of them. I will outline a novel based on my life (every incident will be true, but no one would ever guess that I am the hero). I will invent something in my mind that the world desperately needs. Being: I will spend half an hour in a peaceful place doing nothing except feeling what it is like to exist. I will lie outstretched on the grass and feel the earth languidly revolving under me. I will take in three breaths and let them out as gently as possible. Efficiency: I will let at least two things out of my control and see what happens. I will gaze at a rose and reflect on whether I could make it open faster or more beautifully than it already does—then I will ask if my life has blossomed this efficiently. I will lie in a quiet place by the ocean, or with a tape of the sea, and breathe in its rhythms. Bonding: When I catch myself looking away from someone, I will remember to look into the person’s eyes. I will bestow a loving gaze on someone I have taken for granted. I will express sympathy to someone who needs it, preferably a stranger. Giving: I will buy lunch and give it to someone in need on the street (or I will go to a café and eat lunch with the person). I will compliment someone for a quality that I know the individual values in him- or herself. I will give my children as much of my undivided time today as they want. Immortality: I will read a scripture about the soul and the promise of life after death. I will write down five things I want my life to be remembered for. I will sit and silently experience the gap between breathing in and breathing out, feeling the eternal in the present moment.

Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for nonreaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.

A lady told me about one of her husband’s relatives who was very opinionated. He was always making these cutting, demeaning remarks about her. This couple hadn’t been married that long. Every time they went to family get-togethers, this relative would say something to offend her. She would get all upset and it would ruin the day. She reached the point where she refused to even go to family events. Finally, she told her husband, “You’ve got to do something about that man. He’s your relative.” She was expecting her husband to say, “You’re right, honey. He shouldn’t talk to you like that. I will set him straight.” But the husband did just the opposite. He said, “Honey, I love you but I cannot control him. He has every right to have his opinion. He can say what he wants to, but you have every right to not get offended.” At first she couldn’t understand why her husband wouldn’t really stick up for her. Time and time again she would become upset. If this relative was in one room she would go to another. If he went outside she would make sure she stayed inside. She was always focused on avoiding this man. One day she realized she was giving away her power. It was like a light turned on in her mind. She was allowing one person with issues to keep her from becoming who she was meant to be. When you allow what someone says or does to upset you, you’re allowing them to control you. When you say, “You make me so mad,” what you’re really doing is admitting that you’re giving away your power. As long as that person knows they can push this button and you’ll respond this way, you are giving them exactly what they want. When you allow what someone says or does to upset you, you’re allowing them to control you. People have a right to say what they want, to do what they want, as long as it’s legal. But we have a right to not get offended. We have a right to overlook it. But when we get upset and go around angry, we change. What’s happening is we’re putting too much importance on what they think about us. What they say about you does not define who you are. Their opinion of you does not determine your self-worth. Let that bounce off of you like water off of a duck’s back. They have every right to have their opinion, and you have every right to ignore it.

Glenskehy is outside Dublin, tucked away in the Wicklow mountains near nothing very much. I'd lived half my life in Wicklow without getting any closer to it than the odd signpost. It turned out to be that kind of place: a scatter of houses getting old around a once-a-month church and a pub and a sell-everything shop, small and isolated enough to have been overlooked even by the desperate generation trawling the countryside for homes they can afford. Eight o'clock on a Thursday morning, and the main street - to use both words loosely - was postcard-perfect and empty, just one old woman pulling a shopping trolley past a worn granite monument to something or other, little sugared-almond houses lined up crookedly behind her, and the hills rising green and brown and indifferent over it all. I could imagine someone getting killed there, but a farmer in a generations-old fight over a boundary fence, a woman whose man had turned savage with drink and cabin fever, a man sharing a house with his brother forty years too long: deep-rooted, familiar crimes old as Ireland, nothing to make a detective as experienced as Sam sound like that.

A well-heeled housewife confided that all the husbands in her social circle had recently accepted jobs in China, and were now commuting between Cupertino and Shanghai, partly because their quiet styles prevented them from advancing locally. The American companies “think they can’t handle business,” she said, “because of presentation. In business, you have to put a lot of nonsense together and present it. My husband always just makes his point and that’s the end of it. When you look at big companies, almost none of the top executives are Asians. They hire someone who doesn’t know anything about the business, but maybe he can make a good presentation.” A software engineer told me how overlooked he felt at work in comparison to other people, “especially people from European origin, who speak without thinking.” In China, he said, “If you’re quiet, you’re seen as being wise. It’s completely different here. Here people like to speak out. Even if they have an idea, not completely mature yet, people still speak out. If I could be better in communication, my work would be much more recognized. Even though my manager appreciates me, he still doesn’t know I have done work so wonderful.

To get the idea, take a sheet of paper and draw a 2½-inch line going up, starting at the bottom of the page—without a ruler. Now take another sheet, and start at the top and draw a line going down until it is 2½ inches from the bottom. Compare the lines. There is a good chance that your first estimate of 2½ inches was shorter than the second. The reason is that you do not know exactly what such a line looks like; there is a range of uncertainty. You stop near the bottom of the region of uncertainty when you start from the bottom of the page and near the top of the region when you start from the top. Robyn Le Boeuf and Shafir found many examples of that mechanism in daily experience. Insufficient adjustment neatly explains why you are likely to drive too fast when you come off the highway onto city streets—especially if you are talking with someone as you drive. Insufficient adjustment is also a source of tension between exasperated parents and teenagers who enjoy loud music in their room. Le Boeuf and Shafir note that a “well-intentioned child who turns down exceptionally loud music to meet a parent’s demand that it be played at a ‘reasonable’ volume may fail to adjust sufficiently from a high anchor, and may feel that genuine attempts at compromise are being overlooked.” The driver and the child both deliberately adjust down, and both fail to adjust enough.

The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through the years and the burden will become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them. Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to His rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort. He develops toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, "Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to care what men think.

I do not need a ring. I tried marriage before, as many know. Let me state here that Tom Dennis was a good, decent man who treated me gently and, when I asked, he let me go. I do believe he loved me. But my fiancé was no easy roommate, leaving glasses on wood tables (wood tables, dear reader!) and dropping socks and candy wrappers whenever they ceased being of immediate use; he became like those beachgoers who assume their litter will go out with the tide. I should have known from this that my relationship was in some trouble. But I knew all couples had these fights, and I assumed they were not a detour from love but its bumpy path. So imagine my surprise when (Tom Dennis far in the rearview mirror) I moved into the Shack with Less and this new roommate began to exhibit the same tendencies—socks on the floor, underwear behind the bathroom door, unwashed plates—and, reader, I didn’t care at all! I remember making the bed and finding underneath his pillow a mushroom-like profusion of tissues (for his morning nose-blow) and being filled with…not rage, but tenderness! With Tom Dennis, it was a chore I was willing to bear. With Less—I did not care at all. I stared at those tissues, stupefied. I did not care at all. The difference, you see, dear reader, is that I love him. How do I put it? He is not the best, God knows. He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.” A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing. “Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!” A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name. “Why is it so sheeting cold in here?” yelled someone up the front near the guide. “If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it,” the guide responded promptly. Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do? “But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.” Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter what.

Bang! Clang! Bang! Clangity bang, rat-a-tat! "Reuben, I have been thinking, what a good world this might be, if the men were all transported far beyond the Northern Sea." "Oh,no!" Willow rose off Rider's lap so fast her forhead bumped his chin. "What is that racket?" he asked, standing and following her to the window overlooking the street. One corner of her mouth quirked in mock disgust. "Take a look for yourself." Clangity bang! Rat-a-tat! The men below beat their pots and pans with wooden spoons and, in a couple cases, gun butts. "Rachel, I have long been thinking, what a fine world this might be, if we had some more young ladies on the side of the Northern Sea. Too ral loo ral. Too ral lee." "Looks like your brothers and the whole Niners team!" Rider laughed. "What are they doing?" "Haven't you ever heard of being shivareed, husband?" Outside the boisterous, drunken voices broke into another chorus of Reuben and Rachel. "Rachel, I will not trasport you,but will take you for a wife. We will live on milk and honey, better or worse we're in for life." Willow chuckled as all up and down Allen Street lights began to glow through every window. Someone in a room down the hall lifted their window, threw a chamber pot at the crooners, and followed it with a foul epithet. Undaunted, the man broke into a chorus of Aura Lea. "They sure have lousy timing," Rider commented wryly. "Just how long does this little serenade last?" Seeing a tall figure in a long frock coat coming up the street, Willow replied, "I think it's about to end very soon now." Virgil Earp's face shone in the gaslight in front of the Grand. "All right, boys," the couple heard him say, "the party's over." He looked up at Rider and Willow with a wide, winsome grin and waved. With that, he ushered the drunken serenaders down the street and into a saloon. Rider turned from the window, shaking his head. "Now where were we? Ah,yes!" he swooped Willow off her feet and tossed her onto the huge bed. "That's not where we were." She laughed. "It's where we were headed, lady, and that's good enough for me.

Queen Anne of England established the Longitude Act in 1714, and offered a monetary prize of over a million in today’s dollars to anyone who invented a method to accurately calculate longitude at sea. Longitude is about determining one’s point in space. So one might ask what it has to do with clocks? Mathematically speaking, space (distance) is the child of time and speed (distance equals time multiplied by speed). Thus, anything that moves at a constant speed can be used to calculate distance, provided one knows for how long it has been moving. Many things have constant speeds, including light, sound, and the rotation of the Earth. Your brain uses the near constancy of the speed of sound to calculate where sounds are coming from. As we have seen, you know someone is to your left or right because the sound of her voice takes approximately 0.6 milliseconds to travel from your left to your right ear. Using the delays it takes any given sound to arrive to your left and right ears allows the brain to figure out if the voice is coming directly from the left, the right, or somewhere in between. The Earth is rotating at a constant speed—one that results in a full rotation (360 degrees) every 24 hours. Thus there is a direct correspondence between degrees of longitude and time. Knowing how much time has elapsed is equivalent to knowing how much the Earth has turned: if you sit and read this book for one hour (1/24 of a day), the Earth has rotated 15 degrees (360/24). Thus, if you are sitting in the middle of the ocean at local noon, and you know it is 16:00 in Greenwich, then you are “4 hours from Greenwich”—exactly 60 degrees longitude from Greenwich. Problem solved. All one needs is a really good marine chronometer. The greatest minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not overlook the longitude problem: Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton all devoted their attention to it. In the end, however, it was not a great scientist but one of the world’s foremost craftsman who ultimately was awarded the Longitude Prize. John Harrison (1693–1776) was a self-educated clockmaker who took obsessive dedication to the extreme.

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Instruction of the Mayor of the city, the Vizier Ptahhotep, under the Majesty of King Isesi, who lives for all eternity. The mayor of the city, the vizier Ptahhotep, said: O king, my lord! Age is here, old age arrived. Feebleness came, weakness grows, Childtike one sleeps all day. Eyes are dim, ears deaf. Strength is waning through weariness, The mouth, silenced, speaks not, The heart, void, recalls not the past, The bones ache throughout. Good has become evil, all taste is gone, What age does to people is evil in everything. The nose, clogged, breathes not, Painful are standing and sitting. May this servant be ordered to make a staff of old age, So as to teil him the words of those who heard, The ways of the ancestors, Who have listened to the gods. May such be done for you. So that strife may be banned from the people, And the Two Shores may serve you! Said the majesty of this god: Instruct him then in the sayings of the past, May he become a model for the children of the great, May obedience enter him, And the devotion of him who speaks to him, No one is born wise. Beginning of the formulations of excellent discourse spoken by the Prince, Count, God's Father, God's beloved, Eldest Son of the King, of his body, Mayor of the city and Vizier, Ptahhotep, in instructing the ignorant in knowledge and in the standard of excellent discourse, as profit for him who will hear, as woe to him who would neglect them. He spoke to his son: Don’t be proud of your knowledge. Consult the ignorant and the wise; The limits of art are not reached, No artist’s skills are perfect; Good speech is more hidden than greenstone, Yet may be found among maids at the grindstones. If you meet a disputant in action, A powerful man, superior to you. Fold your arms, bend your back, To flout him will not make him agree with you. Make little of the evil speech By not opposing him while he's in action; He will be called an ignoramus, Your self-control will match his pile (of words). If you meet a disputant in action Who is your equal, on your level, You will make your worth exceed his by silence, While he is speaking evilly, There will be much talk by the hearers. Your name will be good in the mind of the magistrates. If you meet a disputant in action, A poor man, not your equal. Do not attack him because he is weak, Let him alone, he will confute himself. Do not answer him to relieve your heart, Do not vent yourself against your opponent, Wretched is he who injures a poor man, One will wish to do what you desire. You will beat him through the magistrates’ reproof. If you are a man who leads, Who controls the affairs of the many, Seek out every beneficent deed, That your conduct may be blameless. Great is justice, lasting in effect, Unchallenged since the time of Osiris. One punishes the transgressor of laws, Though the greedy overlooks this; Baseness may seize riches, Yet crime never lands its wares; In the end it is justice that lasts, Man says: “It is my father's ground.” Do not scheme against people, God punishes accordingly: If a man says: “I shall live by it,” He will lack bread for his mouth. If a man says: “I shall be rich' He will have to say: “My cleverness has snared me.” If he says: “I will snare for myself,” He will be unable to say: “I snared for my profit.” If a man says: "I will rob someone,” He will end being given to a stranger. People’s schemes do not prevail, God’s command is what prevails; Live then in the midst of peace, What they give comes by itself.

ANDREW: Supposing someone saw you climing in? MILO: Who? You're not overlooked. ANDREW: Who knows? A dallying couple. A passing sheep rapist.

Extremely easy to overlook them. It’s easy to overlook them because when you look at them, they seem insignificant. They’re not big, sweeping things that take huge effort. They’re not heroic or dramatic. Mostly they’re just little things you do every day and that nobody else even notices. They are things that are so simple to do—yet successful people actually do them, while unsuccessful people only look at them and don’t take action. Things like taking a few dollars out of a paycheck, putting it into savings, and leaving it there. Or doing a few minutes of exercise every day—and not skipping it. Or reading ten pages of an inspiring, educational, life-changing book every day. Or taking a moment to tell someone how much you appreciate them, and doing that consistently, every day, for months and years. Little things that seem insignificant in the doing, yet when compounded over time yield very big results. You could call these “little virtues” or “success habits.” I call them simple daily disciplines. Simple productive actions, repeated consistently over time. That, in a nutshell, is the slight edge. ==========

Even in incredible churches, very few members make the effort to greet and speak to someone already seated before the service begins. And, frankly, most church members don’t ever go sit with guests. Guests are most often overlooked in the few minutes right before the worship services. No one speaks to them or sits with them.

Not all healthy families are healthy all the time, and not all dysfunctional families are dysfunctional all the time. Each type, however, has patterns of behaving that keep it either in or out of balance. One way to determine the difference between the two types is to examine how each handles a crisis. During a crisis the healthy family knows and uses alternatives to its usual patterns, and as a result can return to balance when the crisis is over. For example, when an argument occurs between the spouses in a healthy family, each listens and negotiates with the other. Compromise is used, the real problem is confronted, and the family returns to balance. Healthy families must be flexible to maintain balance. A dysfunctional family’s patterns are very rigid. One individual controls family decisions or dominates conversations, adherence to restrictive rules is strictly enforced, and there is absolute denial of family problems, to cite just a few examples. Maintaining these patterns during a crisis doesn’t allow any alternatives to resolving it. In fact, a dysfunctional family is likely to become even more rigid during a crisis and, as a result, become even more dysfunctional. Few things are ever resolved in a dysfunctional family, and a given crisis becomes just one more unresolved issue. As a result, most dysfunctional families are in constant crisis. In an abusive family, for example, the threat of violence never goes away. Most dysfunctional families will grow increasingly more dysfunctional unless someone seeks help. But getting help requires breaking rigid patterns, and this, of course, is against the dysfunctional family’s rules. For example, many dysfunctional families engage in what is called “group think.”1 While group think maintains rigidity, it also ensures that everyone thinks alike. Some aspects of group think include: The family has a single-minded purpose which defies corrective action. The family insists on a closed information system. The family demands absolute loyalty. The family avoids internal or external criticism. The family welcomes you only to the extent that you conform to its beliefs and patterns. Another major difference between functional and dysfunctional family systems involves the victimization of family members either physically or emotionally, as well as a loss of healthy opportunities for growth. Victimization is such a common theme in dysfunctional families that those from all types of dysfunctional families joined the adult children of alcoholics movement, not because they identified with alcoholism, but because they identified with family victimization. Another common theme is anger over lost opportunities, which frequently remains overlooked. We have become so obsessed with talking about victimization that we sometimes fail to understand that not only are dysfunctional family members victimized, but they also suffer from and become angry about what they missed while growing up in their families. For example, a silent son with a dysfunctional father not only was intimidated or abused by his father, but also missed out on the opportunity to have a healthy father-son relationship. The pain of physical abuse goes away, but pain of lost opportunity remains. In my interviews, most silent sons of dysfunctional fathers talked more about the “fathering” they missed than about their father’s dysfunctional behaviors.

when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten minutes in a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for women, for minorities, for anyone society is quick to overlook.

Humans aren’t meant to be monogamous creatures. Most people would probably disagree, but then, most people would also be overlooking the ever-increasing divorce and infidelity rates. Why anyone would choose to rush into something with a 50% chance of failure was incomprehensible to me. Personally, I’d prefer to stick with my own definition: Marriage (noun): betting someone half your stuff that you’ll love them forever.

When you allow what someone says or does to upset you, you’re allowing that person to control you. When you say, “You make me so mad,” what you’re really doing is admitting that you’re giving away your power. As long as the person knows they can push this button and you’ll respond this way, and they can make that remark and you’ll get upset, and they know if they go outside you’ll go inside—as long as you keep responding the same way—you are giving them exactly what they want. People have a right to say what they want, to do what they want, as long as it’s legal. And we have a right to not be offended. We have a right to overlook it. But when we become upset and angry, we change. If somebody walks into a room and we grow tense, it’s because we’re putting too much importance on what that person thinks about us. What a person says about you does not define who you are. His or her opinion of you does not determine your self-worth. Let that bounce off you like water off a duck’s back. This person has every right to have an opinion, and you have every right to ignore it. I’ve found that some people feel it’s their calling in life to point out what others are doing wrong and where others are missing it. They’re constantly critical, always finding fault. There is nothing they love more than keeping someone upset, and arguing, and always on the defensive. Rise above that. You don’t need them to agree with you. You don’t have to win their approval. Let that go, and just be who God made you to be.

Have you ever thought that God may have you somewhere on purpose so you can be a good example? God may want your light to shine, to brighten the days, to make a difference where you are. Why don’t you take a different perspective? If you pass that test and bloom where you are planted, God will open new doors. But as long as you are negative and complaining, nothing will change. You are not in position for God to promote you if you are not the best you can be right where you are. When you are in an uncomfortable situation, realize that either God is doing a work in you or He is using you to do a work in someone else. There is a purpose. There is nothing wrong with asking God to change a situation. But until it happens, you have to trust that where you are is where you should be. I’ve found that sometimes God has us endure a difficult season to help somebody else. We have to sow a seed and be uncomfortable, treated unfairly. We have to be extremely patient and kind and overlook things just so another person can become what God has created that individual to be.

You can gaze over the fence and covet another person’s life or tell yourself that God has blessed you in ways you never could have earned. Do you ever battle with envy? Have you ever wondered why someone else’s life seems easier than yours? Have you ever struggled to celebrate the blessings of someone else who had what you thought you needed? Have you ever wished you could just switch lives with someone? Perhaps there are ways in which envy haunts us all, so it’s worth examining the heart of envy. What things prepare the heart for envy? Envy is forgetful. In concentrating on what we don’t have that we think we should have, we fail to keep in mind the huge catalog of blessings that are ours simply because God has chosen to place his bountiful love on us. This forgetfulness causes us to do more comparing and complaining than praising and resting. Envy misunderstands blessing. So often envy is fueled by misunderstanding what God’s care looks like. It is not always the care of provision, relief, or release. Sometimes God’s blessing comes in the form of trials that are his means of giving us things we could get no other way. Envy is selfish. Envy tends to put us in the center of our own worlds. It tends to make everything about our comfort and ease, our wants, needs, and feelings, and not about the plan and the glory of the God we serve. Envy is self-righteous. Envy has an “I deserve _____ more than they do” posture to it. It forgets that we all deserve immediate and eternal punishment, and that any good thing we have is an undeserved gift of God’s amazing grace. Envy is shortsighted. Envy has a right here, right now aspect to it that overlooks the fact that this moment is not all there is. Envy cannot see that this moment isn’t meant to be a destination, but a preparation for a final destination that will be beautiful beyond our wildest imagination. Envy questions God’s wisdom. When you and I envy, we tend to buy into the thought that we are smarter than God. In envy, we tend to think we know more and better, and if our hands were on the joystick, we would be handling things a different way. Envy is impatient. Envy doesn’t like to wait. Envy complains quickly and tires easily. Envy doesn’t just cry for blessings; it cries for blessings now. What is devastating about envy is that it questions God’s goodness, and when you do that, you quit running to him for help. So cry out for rescue—that God would give you a thankful, humble, and patient heart. His transforming grace is your only defense against envy. For further study and encouragement: Psalm 34

need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it. “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.” He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation. She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day. Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames. He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so. He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been. Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited. He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the