Stress Free Life Quotes

You must learn to let go. Release the stress. You were never in control anyway.

6 Ways To Give Your Mind A Break: 1. Stop stressing 2. Stop worrying 3. Give rest to the problems weighing you down 4. Lighten up 5. Forgive yourself 6. Forgive others

There are many things evil people can take from you. However, they can never steal your ability to laugh and laugh loud.

Not every person wants the prettiest, smartest, talented or spiritually uplifting person to build a life with. Sometimes we just want that special someone that makes sense, puts up with us, has patience, comes without drama, gives us focus and is willing to run with our half-baked ideas.

Never blame any day in your life. Good days give you happiness, bad days give you experience, and the worst days give you a lesson.

...I’ve discovered that if you want to reach your true potential, it’s much more effective to ignite a new passion for life than to dwell on past problems.

The whole time I pretend I have mental telepathy. And with my mind only, I’ll say — or think? — to the target, 'Don’t do it. Don’t go to that job you hate. Do something you love today. Ride a roller coaster. Swim in the ocean naked. Go to the airport and get on the next flight to anywhere just for the fun of it. Maybe stop a spinning globe with your finger and then plan a trip to that very spot; even if it’s in the middle of the ocean you can go by boat. Eat some type of ethnic food you’ve never even heard of. Stop a stranger and ask her to explain her greatest fears and her secret hopes and aspirations in detail and then tell her you care because she is a human being. Sit down on the sidewalk and make pictures with colorful chalk. Close your eyes and try to see the world with your nose—allow smells to be your vision. Catch up on your sleep. Call an old friend you haven’t seen in years. Roll up your pant legs and walk into the sea. See a foreign film. Feed squirrels. Do anything! Something! Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with each breath you take. Just don’t go back to thatmiserable place you go every day. Show me it’s possible to be an adult and also be happy. Please. This is a free country. You don’t have to keep doing this if you don’t want to. You can do anything you want. Be anyone you want. That’s what they tell us at school, but if you keep getting on that train and going to the place you hate I’m going to start thinking the people at school are liars like the Nazis who told the Jews they were just being relocated to work factories. Don’t do that to us. Tell us the truth. If adulthood is working some death-camp job you hate for the rest of your life, divorcing your secretly criminal husband, being disappointed in your son, being stressed and miserable, and dating a poser and pretending he’s a hero when he’s really a lousy person and anyone can tell that just by shaking his slimy hand — if it doesn’t get any better, I need to know right now. Just tell me. Spare me from some awful fucking fate. Please.

I began my studies with eagerness. Before me I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things. In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another [with sight and hearing]. Its people, scenery, manners, joys, and tragedies should be living tangible interpreters of the real world. The lecture halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom... But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my young inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the light of common day." Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going to college. The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures – solitude, books and imagination – outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.

The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies—that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. You

We are all the same eternal constant pure consciousness. We are all the same life-force electricity that gives us all life. Treat everyone with love because they are you underneath these bodies and temporary thought forms.

Every single thing we do stems from the quality of our mind. Our lives are reflections of our state of mind. Minds can be chaotic and stressful, or peaceful and grateful. It’s a simple choice we make in every single moment.

Show me it’s possible to be an adult and also be happy. Please. This is a free country. You don’t have to keep doing this if you don’t want to. You can do anything you want. Be anyone you want. That’s what they tell us at school, but if you keep getting on that train and going to the place you hate I’m going to start thinking the people at school are liars like the Nazis who told the Jews they were just being relocated to work factories. Don’t do that to us. Tell us the truth. If adulthood is working some death-camp job you hate for the rest of your life, divorcing your secretly criminal husband, being disappointed in your son, being stressed and miserable, and dating a poser and pretending he’s a hero when he’s really a lousy person and anyone can tell that just by shaking his slimy hand—if it doesn’t get any better, I need to know right now. Just tell me. Spare me from some awful fucking fate. Please.

I like to read and write because it is the ONLY thing that takes my mind off of the real world and my spinning worries. It is a time I can be free of anxiety, worry, and stress. When my life gets hectic I HAVE to read and write or I'll drown.

No meditation, no life. Know meditation, know life.

Life has no remote. Get up and change it yourself.

Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life’s difficulties.

For human nature is such that grief and pain - even simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others. So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we became aware of the hunger; and repeating the same error, we now say: "If it was not for the hunger!...

We have now become so fragile that anything and anyone can disturb our mental peace. A huge part of our life gets lost in chasing useless objects and fighting pointless battles. It's time to slow down and reflect.

Life isn't burger king. You can't always have it your way.

It’s time to stop allowing people to blame the woman for everything. As women, we try to figure out what they need, what they want; and the entire time we’re stressing ourselves out and they don’t give a shit as long as it’s done. Hell, no. Timeout for that too! We do not give a rat’s ass anymore—they are quick to blame us for their mess-ups and think we are supposed to make magic happen. It is time to let them deal with it and figure out how they are going to mend their shit. If they want to blame us, let them, who cares? Their shit isn’t our problem. Go ahead, blame the women. We are holding up the peace sign, smiling and laughing, feeling good as we press forward! ​We are free and feel refreshed. It feels good to be the last ones standing. We look at life totally differently, and we now see that it’s okay to be a little rough around the edges.

When we are depleted our giving is empty. Today I take a moment to recharge, fill up with love for my life and all of its character so that I may give from a place of overflowing.

Fighting fear is a full-time job.

Two Words from Sanskrit, that are Strikingly similar. CHITA & CHINTA One Burns the Dead & the other Burns the Living. Have a STRESS free Life….—feelingalive.

Anarchism alone stresses the importance of the individual, his possibilities and needs in a free society. Instead of telling him that he must fall down and worship before institutions, live and die for abstractions, break his heart and stunt his life for taboos, Anarchism insists that the center of gravity in society is the individual--that he must think for himself, act freely, and live fully. The aim of Anarchism is that every individual in the world shall be able to do so. If he is to develop freely and fully, he must be relieved from the interference and oppression of others. Freedom is, therefore, the cornerstone of the Anarchist philosophy. Of course, this has nothing in common with a much boasted "rugged individualism." Such predatory individualism is really flabby, not rugged. At the least danger to its safety it runs to cover of the state and wails for protection of armies, navies, or whatever devices for strangulation it has at its command. Their "rugged individualism" is simply one of the many pretenses the ruling class makes to unbridled business and political extortion.

The greatest weapon against stress is relaxed breathing.

The mind is just like a muscle - the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.” -Idowu Koyenikan

Self-acceptance is essential to be stress free.

Like the butterfly, you will also go through stages of change, rebirth, and new beginnings for transformation and renewal. Use these changes to create a clarity of purpose for a personal renaissance. Break out of your comfort zone, shed old layers, and stretch in your potential to become your best self. Be free of outdated limitations, experience rebirth and take flight.

Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen.

Whenever you feel overwhelmed, distracted and out of sorts. Turn your attention to your breath, inhale, exhale, and listen to the sound and movement of your everyday breath flowing softly in and out through your nose. You will reclaim your calm and refocus on what matters.

Laughter IS the BEST medicine! It’s FREE! You can overdose on it! It helps you embrace the insanities of life! It reduces stress, heals your body and relieves pain! It fights disease and cancer and strengthens the immune system! It eases your mind, it protects your heart and soothes your soul!

The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life.

Breath is the bridge, Between living and dying; Breath is the licence For joyous living;

Every soul craves to fill the void. Only God can satisfy and set us free.

How beautiful it is to be stress free and bloom slowly like a flower.

A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life.

How much more pain is required for you to stop bothering about everything and be free, absolutely free?

Your life will become more fulfilling when you loose the anger, stress, anxiety and “poor me” attitude. Let it go.

If you want to conquer pain, anxiety and stress in life, make it a point to visit great trees often and make a connection with them.

He who is different from me does not impoverish me—he enriches me. —Antoine de St. Exupery

Getting unstuck is a matter of choice. If you want flourish in life make a choice today to move into that reality. You can do it.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. —Oliver Wendell Holmes

Health is... A disease-free body. A quiver-free breath. A stress-free mind. An inhibition-free intellect. An obsession-free memory. An ego that includes all. A soul that is free from sorrow.

Welcome to the real-life experience of “knowledge work,” and a profound operational principle: you have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you’re afraid you might. As Peter Drucker wrote: “In knowledge work . . . the task is not given; it has to be determined. ‘What are the expected results from this work?’ is . . . the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved.”*

For human nature is such that grief and pain—even simultaneously suffered—do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others.

Telephones, automobiles, and economic pressure all combine to create physical letdown and mental stress so great that today practically no home is entirely free from sufferers of some form of nervous tension.

Minimalism is really about reassessment of priorities, so you can remove unnecessary thigns from your life; get rid of things like possessions, activities, and relationships that do not improve or bring value to your life.

There's something so freeing about cutting myself loose from technology in some small way. No more stressing over profile pictures or whether my social media feeds reflect the kind of golden, idealized life I want everyone to think I have. No more virus scans or junk mail or counting likes. If I want to look something up, I go to the library. If I want to talk to someone, I talk to them.

Much of what we do arises from automatic programming that bypasses conscious awareness and may even run contrary to our intentions, as Dr. Schwartz points out: The passive side of mental life, which is generated solely and completely by brain mechanisms, dominates the tone and tenor of our day-to-day, even our second-to-second experience. During the quotidian business of daily life, the brain does indeed operate very much as a machine does. Decisions that we may believe to be freely made can arise from unconscious emotional drives or subliminal beliefs. They can be dictated by events of which we have no recollection. The stronger a person’s automatic brain mechanisms and the weaker the parts of the brain that can impose conscious control, the less true freedom that person will be able to exercise in her life. In OCD, and in many other conditions, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning the individual, the malfunctioning brain circuitry may override rational judgment and intention. Almost any human being when overwhelmed by stress or powerful emotions, will act or react not from intention but from mechanisms that are set off deep in the brain, rather than being generated in the conscious and volitional segments of the cortex. When acting from a driven or triggered state, we are not free.

Complaining, whether silently or aloud, is a major man repellant. When you complain, you are arguing with what is: you’re saying life is not how you think it should be. This victimizes you and creates stress and anxiety in your body. And that stress has a negative impact on your appearance: premature aging, a worsening of acne or psoriasis, and, my personal favorite, an increase in cortisol, the stress hormone that causes an increase in abdominal fat. That being said, men are attracted to more than looks in a woman. They are attracted to the way you make them feel. Women who are complaint-free make men feel good because they themselves feel good.

Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.‡ Even when I’m well I like to lie in bed and think. It’s as if

The concept of hard times resulting in a positive transformation is repeated in nature over and over again; it’s why they say that a diamond is a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well! Think about how a caterpillar has to cocoon herself in darkness and wait, in a space which becomes far too small for her expanding wings. If you were to interfere with the process and help her out, she would never develop the strength she needs to fly; it’s the struggling which makes her powerful enough to break free and become a butterfly.

Security means the state of being free from danger or threat. Danger means the possibility of suffering harm or injury. The possibility of something unwelcome or unpleasant happening. There are times I have to stress as I express the correct, precise, real and honest definitions; so that the deceptive, politically motivated folks who destructively branded me as “threat to danger” would realise their double denial duplicity, dishonesty and hypocrisy. Have you at least questioned the personal motives and faulty malicious and intentional misjudgment or at least be honestly curious to discern the motive of a cunning person who warns you against another as a danger, a threat or a risk to life or security? Did the political harridan mean political threat to her political coalition or a danger to reveal the harridan's creative deception matched with her political ambitious power links? ~ Angelica Hopes, K.H. Trilogy

There’s a destructive power in unforgiveness and unforgiveness controls you in a negative way. It’s time to let it all go! You become strong when you genuinely forgive. You become empowered when you genuinely forgive. You gain back your inner peace when you genuinely forgive. You release stress, bitterness and anger when you genuinely forgive. But most importantly, you’re able to live your best life when you genuinely forgive. Give yourself permission to live life free of toxic thoughts, feelings, and energy. Forgive!

You would free yourself from so much stress and drama if you just understood and embraced the truth that you are enough.

When a door slams right in front of you, don't stress, because not every door is meant for you. The right doors will open for you, at the right time.

there is no fear when you truly live in the moment (unless a tiger is charging at you at this very instance).

After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.

This is why the origins of the minimalist art movement matter to the present day understanding of the minimalist philosophy. While the way in which people interact act with the idea of minimalism are categorically different from how the artists during this period used them, the basic ideas surrounding the movement as a whole certainly have influenced how minimalism is understood today.

Simply put stress is reacting negatively to perceived unpleasant things in your life. When you learn to be aware of how you are breathing, it becomes easier for you to stop stress and reclaim your calm.

Sourdough causes certain endocrine glands to secrete hormones that affect your feelings and behavior by making you happy. Therefore, it counteracts depression, in turn reducing the stress of depression. Your stress-free life helps you maintain a youthful disposition, both physically and mentally. So, eat lots of sourdough bread! - I'll be honest, I stole a quote about chocolate, but I'm sure it still counts!

As soon as you wake up, before you get out of bed, let your first thought be one of gratitude. Start with a few deep breaths and then think about five people in your life you’re grateful for. While breathing in slowly and deeply, bring the first person’s face in front of your closed eyes. Try to “see” this person as clearly as you can. Then send him or her silent gratitude while breathing out, again slowly and deeply. Repeat this exercise with five people. Avoid rushing through the experience. Relish the few seconds you spend remembering them. This practice will help you focus on what’s most important in your life and provide context to your day. At an opportune time, let your loved ones and friends know about your morning gratitude practice. Won’t it be nice for them to know that even if you are a thousand miles away, your first thought of the day is gratitude for them?

Everyone has an Everest. Whether it’s a climb you chose, or a circumstance you find yourself in, you’re in the middle of an important journey. Can you imagine a climber scaling the wall of ice at Everest’s Lhotse Face and saying, “This is such a hassle”? Or spending the first night in the mountain’s “death zone” and thinking, “I don’t need this stress”? The climber knows the context of his stress. It has personal meaning to him; he has chosen it. You are most liable to feel like a victim of the stress in your life when you forget the context the stress is unfolding in. “Just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest” is a way to remember the paradox of stress. The most meaningful challenges in your life will come with a few dark nights. The biggest problem with trying to avoid stress is how it changes the way we view our lives, and ourselves. Anything in life that causes stress starts to look like a problem. If you experience stress at work, you think there’s something wrong with your job. If you experience stress in your marriage, you think there’s something wrong with your relationship. If you experience stress as a parent, you think there’s something wrong with your parenting (or your kids). If trying to make a change is stressful, you think there’s something wrong with your goal. When you think life should be less stressful, feeling stressed can also seem like a sign that you are inadequate: If you were strong enough, smart enough, or good enough, then you wouldn’t be stressed. Stress becomes a sign of personal failure rather than evidence that you are human. This kind of thinking explains, in part, why viewing stress as harmful increases the risk of depression. When you’re in this mindset, you’re more likely to feel overwhelmed and hopeless. Choosing to see the connection between stress and meaning can free you from the nagging sense that there is something wrong with your life or that you are inadequate to the challenges you face. Even if not every frustrating moment feels full of purpose, stress and meaning are inextricably connected in the larger context of your life. When you take this view, life doesn’t become less stressful, but it can become more meaningful.

We are evolving beyond the need for instinctual survival. No longer do we need to rely on our instincts of fight or flight, because our stresses today are not life-threatening. We have the recourse to remain at peace and in tune with the Universe. No longer do we need to be blinded by our impulsive human behaviors and reactions. We are coming to a time of transcendence in which we can choose to unplug ourselves from our predictable reactions and create a new future. Right now, our futures are easily calculable by those who understand the formula for humanity. Yet, what is missing from the formula is humanity’s ability to awaken and begin to truly exercise free will.

Chapter 1 Summary The debate in science is between the mind being what the brain does versus the brain doing the bidding of the mind. The correct view is that the mind is designed to control the body, of which the brain is a part, not the other way around. Our brain does not control us; we control our brain through our thinking and choosing. We can control our reactions to anything. Choices are real. You are free to make choices about how you focus your attention, and this affects how the chemicals, proteins, and wiring of your brain change and function. Research shows that DNA actually changes shape in response to our thoughts. Stress stage one is normal. Stress stage two and stage three, on the other hand, are our mind and body’s response to toxic thinking—basically normal stress gone wrong. Reaction is the key word here. You cannot control the events or circumstances of your life, but you can control your reactions.

One would think that the adverse effects of, say, low socioeconomic status in childhood would occur as a result of brain development being delayed. Instead, the problem is that the early-life stress accelerates maturation of the brain, meaning that the window for brain construction being sculpted by experience closes earlier: U. Tooley, D. Bassett, and P. Mackay, “Environmental Influences on the Pace of Brain Development,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 22 (2021): 372.

Recognizing that chronic childhood stress leads to chronic adult illness and relationship challenges can be enormously freeing. If you have been wondering why you’ve been struggling a little too hard for a little too long with your emotional and physical well-being—feeling as if you’ve been swimming against some invisible current that never ceases—this aha can come as a welcome relief. Finally, you can see the current. And you see how it’s been working steadily against you all of your life.

Nicodemus’ and Millburn’s take on how many clothes a minimalist should own is not something that should intimidate you; rather, it’s simply a number to consider. Organize your closet in a way that is most practical for you and your ideal lifestyle.

Studies on primates and other animals have also shown that low social status and being dominated enhance the risk of drug use, with negative effects on dopamine receptors. By contrast, after being housed with more subordinate animals, dominant monkeys had an increase of over 20 percent of their dopamine receptors and a decrease in their tendency to use cocaine.7 The findings of stress research suggest that the issue is not control over others, but whether one is free to exercise control in one’s own life.

People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant’s recollection and there it is: complete tranquillity. And by tranquillity I mean a kind of harmony. So keep getting away from it all—like that. Renew yourself. But keep it brief and basic. A quick visit should be enough to ward off all < . . . > and send you back ready to face what awaits you. What’s there to complain about? People’s misbehavior? But take into consideration: • that rational beings exist for one another; • that doing what’s right sometimes requires patience; • that no one does the wrong thing deliberately; • and the number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried. . . . and keep your mouth shut. Or are you complaining about the things the world assigns you? But consider the two options: Providence or atoms. And all the arguments for seeing the world as a city. Or is it your body? Keep in mind that when the mind detaches itself and realizes its own nature, it no longer has anything to do with ordinary life—the rough and the smooth, either one. And remember all you’ve been taught—and accepted—about pain and pleasure. Or is it your reputation that’s bothering you? But look at how soon we’re all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of all those applauding hands. The people who praise us—how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it all takes place. The whole earth a point in space—and most of it uninhabited. How many people there will be to admire you, and who they are. So keep this refuge in mind: the back roads of your self. Above all, no strain and no stress. Be straightforward. Look at things like a man, like a human being, like a citizen, like a mortal. And among the things you turn to, these two: i. That things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside it. Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions. ii. That everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist. Think of how many changes you’ve already seen. “The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.

For example, you can help avoid the stress of financial insecurity by living within your means and saving for the future. You can also get a solid education and qualify for a well-paying job. The basic principles of economics can’t be violated without stressful consequences.

Now I love lists. I like long detailed lists. I like big unruly lists. I like sorting unsorted lists into outline form, then separating out their topics into lists of their own. Every single project I do involves the making of lists. I make them for organization, of course, but I also make them for assessment, for momentum as a stress reliever, and, counterintuitively, as a means to improve my creativity and free my thinking. There are daily lists, there are project lists. There are “things to order” lists. I make lists of pieces of research that I want together, lists of people I am collaborating with . . . . I make lists of things I need to purchase, things I need to find, and when all of those objects are going to get to me. And hopefully, finally, there are “homestretch” lists, that tell me I’m reaching the end.

To sum up, the first step towards minimalism is to truly find out what makes you happy, and then to see how much time you really are spending on things that actually matter to you and make you happy. This is easier said than done, so take it easy, and take enough time to walk through these steps carefully.

Love is what you are already. Love doesn’t seek anything. It’s already complete. It doesn’t want, doesn’t need, has no shoulds. It already has everything it wants, it already is everything it wants, just the way it wants it. So when I hear people say that they love someone and want to be loved in return, I know they’re not talking about love. They’re talking about something else. Sometimes you may seem to trade love for the stressful thought appearing in the moment. It’s a little trip out into illusion. Seeking love is how you lose the awareness of love. But you can only lose the awareness of it, not the state. That’s not an option, because love is what we all are. That’s immovable. When you investigate your stressful thinking and your mind becomes clear, love pours into your life, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Love joins everything, without condition. It doesn’t avoid the nightmare; it looks forward to it and then inquires. There is no way to join except to get free of your belief that you want something from your partner. That’s true joining. It’s like “Bingo! You just won the lottery!” If I want something from my partner, I simply ask. If he says no and I have a problem with that, I need to take a look at my thinking. Because I already have everything. We all do. That’s how I can sit here so comfortably: I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give. I don’t even want your freedom if you don’t. I don’t even want your peace. The truth that you experience is how I’m able to join with you. That’s how you touch me, and you touch me so intimately that it brings tears to my eyes. I’ve joined you, and you don’t have a choice. And I do this over and over and over, endlessly, effortlessly. It’s called making love. Love wouldn’t deny a breath. It wouldn’t deny a grain of sand or a speck of dust. It is totally in love with itself, and it delights in acknowledging itself through its own presence, in every way, without limit. It embraces it all, everything from the murderer and the rapist to the saint to the dog and cat. Love is so vast within itself that it will burn you up. It’s so vast that there’s nothing you can do with it. All you can do is be it.

Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot,the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition? The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; but suggesting that the proper stuff for fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he’d be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. “He’s happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it’s because he doesn’t have any stress in his life,” says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby. In his chronic forgetfulness, EP has achieved a kind of pathological enlightenment, a perverted vision of the Buddhist ideal of living entirely in the present.

Living in survival entails living in stress and functioning as a materialist, believing that the outer world is more real than the inner world. When you are under the gun of the fight-or-flight nervous system, being run by its cocktail of intoxicating chemicals, you are programmed to be concerned only about your body, the things or people in your environment, and your obsession with time. Your brain and body are out of balance. You are living a predictable life. However, when you are truly in the elegant state of creation, you are no body, no thing, no time—you forget about yourself. You become pure consciousness, free from the chains of the identity that needs the outer reality to remember who it thinks it is.

Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. This is the first book that they wrote together. Everything That Remains is their second book that they published after the development of their own publishing house known as the Asymmetrical Press. Minimalism is a documentary that they produced on their favorite topic. The duo also hosts a podcast entitled The Minimalist Podcast

Today, you can live the let-go life in your family life because God Himself builds your house and watches over your children. I pray your heart will be more and more established in knowing that because of what Jesus has done on the cross, your children can be blessed in every area of their lives. Just as the children of Israel experienced supernatural light in their dwellings when all of Egypt was enveloped in darkness (see Ex. 10:23), may you and your children also experience the Lord’s protection and supernatural light even in these dark times we’re living in. In Jesus’ mighty name, I speak blessings upon you and your household and declare that your days and the days of your children shall be as days of heaven upon the earth!

I predicted that, in order to live a vital life, prevent disease, or optimize the chance for disease remission, you would need: Healthy relationships, including a strong network of family, friends, loved ones, and colleagues A healthy, meaningful way to spend your days, whether you work outside the home or in it A healthy, fully expressed creative life that allows your soul to sing its song A healthy spiritual life, including a sense of connection to the sacred in life A healthy sexual life that allows you the freedom to express your erotic self and explore fantasies A healthy financial life, free of undue financial stress, which ensures that the essential needs of your body are met A healthy environment, free of toxins, natural-disaster hazards, radiation, and other unhealthy factors that threaten the health of the body A healthy mental and emotional life, characterized by optimism and happiness and free of fear, anxiety, depression, and other mental-health ailments A healthy lifestyle that supports the physical health of the body, such as good nutrition, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and avoidance of unhealthy addictions

Depression is often framed as a sufferer having a cognitively distorted sense of “learned helplessness,” where the reality of some loss in the past becomes mistakenly perceived as an inevitable future. In this study, though, it was not that depressed individuals were cognitively distorted, underestimating their actual control. Instead they were accurate compared with everyone else’s overestimates. Findings like these support the view that in some circumstances, depressed individuals are not distortive but are “sadder but wiser.” As such, depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality. And thus, perhaps, “we’re better off believing in it anyway.” Truth doesn’t always set you free; truth, mental health, and well-being have a complex relationship, something explored in an extensive literature on the psychology of stress.

This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. And this is not only true of my life, I am forced to conclude; it is the life of millions of women in America. I stress America, because today, the American woman more than any other has the privilege of choosing such a life. Woman in large parts of the civilized world has been forced back by war, by poverty, by collapse, by the sheer struggle to survive, into a smaller circle of immediate time and space, immediate family life, immediate problems of existence. The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this enviable and precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above its apparent economic, national or even sex limitations.

Personally, this next benefit is even more of a reason to become a minimalist than being able to save money. Stress can cause physical ailments in the sense that it contributes to premature aging, those pesky grey hairs on your head, and even memory loss. What’s more, clutter in the home is known to shift our attention away from what we are truly trying to focus on. We have enough stressors in our life; we don’t need our stuff to create more reasons to worry.

Stress-free moments certainly exist, but that is the extent of it. People, who have bought into the idea of a stress-free life, believe they should be happy and positive all the time. They have been sold a damaging falsehood. As the first sentence in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled famously said: “Life is difficult.” Learning to deal effectively with life’s difficulties, learning to manage the inevitable stress of life is attainable, while eliminating stress is not.

Unrealistic expectations can often be a barrier to a minimalist lifestyle. This chapter is going to look at the realistic results that you can expect when you start your journey towards minimalism. As we move through these topics, it’s important to remember that fast results are not the goal of minimalism. Let’s take a look at some of the expectations that many people have when they try out minimalism, and how you can interpret these expectations so that you’re not under any false assumptions before you begin.

Part I of this book covered an overview and background of minimalist living –the history of minimalism, how it evolved, and its benefits. Part II will enable you to take action. We’ll take a journey together through a typical home, and explore minimalist tactics that can be used for the bedroom, the kitchen, the family room, the basement and garage, the office, and other areas of your home. Let’s take a look at some of the more general strategies many minimalists use that can be applied to multiples areas of your home.

One of the great divides, I think, between people who date a lot and people who date never is that people who date never don’t understand putting up with “fine.” I can’t begin to conceive of why anybody would voluntarily spend great chunks of her free time dedicated to someone she doesn’t adore, because I never do that. My dater friends, on the other hand, do this all the time. I know this because I’m the one they meet up with after, and I’m the one who has to try to understand why my otherwise brilliant friends keep hanging out with people about whom they only have bad (or very, very mediocre) things to say. A person who has spent her life planning her free time based only on herself, and the friends she knows she loves, can’t understand this. Why would I want to go out to dinner and a movie with someone I’m not completely crazy about when I already know how much I like eating dinner and watching a movie by myself, or with Rylee? Getting someone else involved means I have to put on a nicer outfit and stress out about the way I look chewing my food. If I’m going to have to consider my chewing face, I only want to do it for someone I think I might be able to really like. I know that might make it harder for me. I know there is a possibility—a very little one, though, that I have a hard time really believing in—that chemistry can grow where there wasn’t any to begin with. I know that if I don’t put myself out there, I won’t just answer my door someday to find my perfect spouse waiting on the other side of the stoop. AND I know that if that did happen, I should probably call the police.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

...a large segment of our population appears to have moved, in its cultural beliefs, to the use of an "ideal" measuring implement, based particularly on the individual's self-assessment of what "one's life should be like," e.g., essentially symptom free. This has moved us radically away from the reality of the human condition in which most of us have some nagging physical and mental symptoms for much of our lives. If one looks at history, developing countries, the poor, or soldiers (engaged in a highly stressful, physically and psychologically demanding and always potentially dangerous profession), this reality is clear. One recognizes that such culturally espoused ideal states of health are at best illusory. Life is filled with traumas, fears, apprehensions, hunger, aches, pains, illnesses, failures, unfulfilling work, and memories of pain. It is balanced by moments of happiness and pleasure, memories of positive events, doing one's duty, and enduring. The evolutionary history of our species is one in which those individuals who have survived to continue the human line have done so in the face of extreme violence, hunger, drought, flood, diseases, and war.

For all the allure of speciously stress-free suburbs, for all the grinding of city life, cities endure. And when all those diverse energies are harnessed, and those choices, private and public, cohere, and all the bargains made in a million ways every day hold up, then a city flourishes and is the most stimulating center for life, and the most precious artifact, a culture can create. Think of great cities large and small (size, as with any work of art, does not necessarily determine value) and, in addition to nodes of government, commerce, law, hospitals, libraries, and newspapers will come to mind, as will restaurants and theaters and houses of worship and museums and opera houses and galleries and universities. And so will stadia and arenas and parks. In short, once finds not simply commerce but culture, not simply work but leisure, not only negotium but otium, not simply that which ennobles but also that which perfects us. Such has forever been the ultimate purpose of a city, to mirror our higher state, not simply to shelter us from wind and rain. As with leisure, so with the city: It is the setting to make us not the best that Nature can make us, but to manifest the best we, humankind, adding Art to Nature, can make us.

Lost In The World" (feat. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver) [Sample From "Woods": Justin Vernon] I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind I'm building a still to slow down the time I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind I'm building a still to slow down the time I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind I'm building a still to slow down the time [Chorus 2x:] I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night Down for the night Said she's down for the night [Kanye West:] You're my devil, you're my angel You're my heaven, you're my hell You're my now, you're my forever You're my freedom, you're my jail You're my lies, you're my truth You're my war, you're my truce You're my questions, you're my proof You're my stress and you're my masseuse Mama-say mama-say ma-ma-coo-sah Lost in this plastic life, Let's break out of this fake ass party Turn this into a classic night If we die in each other's arms we still get laid in the afterlife If we die in each other's arms we still get laid [Chorus:] (I'm lost in the world) Run from the lights, run from the night, (I'm down on my mind) Run for your life, I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night Down for the night Down for the night I'm lost in the world, been down for my whole life, I'm new in the city but I'm down for the night Down for the night Down for the night Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? [Chorus:] I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind I'm new in the city, and I'm down for the night Down for the night Said she's down for the night I'm lost in the world, I'm down on my mind I'm new in the city and I'm goin' for a ride Goin' for a ride I'm lost in the world, been down for my whole life I'm new in the city but I'm down the for the night Down for a night, down for a good time [Gil-Scott Heron:] Us living as we do upside down. And the new word to have is revolution. People don't even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel because God's whole card has been thoroughly piqued. And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey. The youngsters who were programmed to continue fucking up woke up one night digging Paul Revere and Nat Turner as the good guys. America stripped for bed and we had not all yet closed our eyes. The signs of truth were tattooed across our open ended vagina. We learned to our amazement the untold tale of scandal. Two long centuries buried in the musty vault, hosed down daily with a gagging perfume. America was a bastard, the illegitimate daughter of the mother country whose legs were then spread around the world and a rapist known as freedom, free doom. Democracy, liberty, and justice were revolutionary code names that preceded the bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling in the mother country's crotch What does Webster say about soul? All I want is a good home and a wife And our children and some food to feed them every night. After all is said and done build a new route to China if they'll have you. Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America? Who will survive in America?

This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs. I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content. I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube. A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime. Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented

Imagine yourself having a fight with your romantic partner. The tension of the situation makes your limbic system run at full throttle and you become flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin. The high levels of these chemicals suddenly make you so damn angry, that you burst out in front of your partner saying, “I wish you die, so that I can have some peace in my life”. Given the stress of the situation through highly active limbic system, your PFC loses its freedom to take the right decision and you burst out with foul language in front of your partner, that may ruin your relationship. In simple terms due to your mental instability, you lost your free will to make the right decision. But when the conversation is over, and you relax for a while, your stress hormone levels come down to normal, and you regain your usual cheerful state of mind. Immediately, your PFC starts analyzing the explosive conversation you had with your partner. Healthy activity of the entire frontal lobes, especially the PFC suddenly overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt. Your brain makes you realize, that you have done something devilish. As a result, now you find yourself making the willful decision of apologizing to your partner and making up to him or her, no matter how much effort it takes, because your PFC comes up the solution that it is the healthiest thing to do for your personal life. From this you can see, that what you call free will is something that is not consistent. It changes based on your mental health. Mental instability or illness, truly cripples your free will. And the healthier your frontal lobes are, the better you can take good decisions. And the most effective way to keep your frontal lobes healthy is to practice some kind of meditation.

WHAT IS CALMNESS? Calmness is not a character trait, it’s simply a skill. You have to decide that it matters, that the quality of your presence would be better if you slowed yourself down and were really connected to people and the moment you are living in. Then you practise until gradually it becomes part of you. It benefits everyone around you – they feel peaceful and happy in your presence. It’s exactly what children need in a parent. And it benefits you – with less stress hormones, you live longer and feel better. Calmness is well worth cultivating. Calmness is made up of certain actions; breathing deeper, dropping your shoulders, settling your muscles, feeling your feet strongly planted on the ground, focusing your thoughts on the job in hand in a steady easy way, and not going off into panicked thoughts. Even just counting three or four breaths, in and out, will slow your heartbeat and calm your mind down. Calm people are actually doing these things automatically; when an emergency strikes they intentionally calm themselves more in order to counter the tendency to panic and do the wrong thing. Self-regulating your level of emotional arousal is an incredibly valuable skill for life. All you have to do is notice, am I calm? If not, breathe a couple of times consciously, feel your feet on the ground, and notice how, as the last burst of adrenaline clears away, the calmness response starts to kick in. Practise this for a few days, and soon the natural appeal of calmness will pull you more and more to that peaceful and steady place. Everything is better – the taste of food, the scent of flowers, the feel of the water in your shower, warm on your skin. You will find that time slows down, and you can think more in the pause before you open your mouth. And that has real benefits!

Unfortunately, sitting rests the parts of the body that don’t need much of it while working the parts that desperately do. Specifically, it disengages the lower extremities while utilizing the spine. (This is in sharp contrast to squatting, which disengages the spine while utilizing the lower extremities.) Because sitting positions the spine vertically, it provides no rest or relief from the gravitational forces that compress it. Without a periodic therapeutic reprieve through the day, the relentless load overwhelms the entire structure, joints and muscles alike. To maintain an erect seated posture, some muscle groups in the back have to continually contract. Since this requires a great deal of energy, the muscles quickly become fatigued. (That is why slumping is more comfortable: It takes less energy to maintain.) When the muscles tire, you rely on the backrest more and your muscles less. The less you rely on your muscles, the weaker and more dysfunctional they become. The weaker and more dysfunctional they become, the more you rely on the backrest. The more you rely on the backrest, the more you tend to slump. The more you slump, the more pronounced the debilitating C-shaped curvature becomes. This weakens the muscles in your back even further, which causes them to overload the joints they serve. Sitting in chairs affects even the areas seemingly at rest (particularly the hips and knees). Because sitting keeps the joints static for long periods, the muscles that serve them become fixed in a short, tight position. When at last you do get up and move, the muscles impose more stress on these joints, thereby increasing their susceptibility to wear and tear. The prolonged stasis also prevents the joints from being lubricated with nourishing synovial fluid. Once depleted, the hips and knees, like the spine, deteriorate and erode. Is it any wonder that the areas most traumatized by sitting, namely, the lower back, hips, and knees, are also the most arthritic and disabled areas of the body in the world today? The real mystery is why so few people have made the connection between prolonged sitting and the epidemic of chronic pain. In fact, they need only look to their own bodies for an abundance of evidence.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people- the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer; human companionship, major league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, “next year, I’ll start living…next year I’ll start my life.” Innocence is a better world. Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares; singlemindledly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now faint, now clear ringing the air through which the hounds tear, open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in their lungs. What I call innocence is the spirit’s unselfconscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn’t be, shouldn’t be reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s a message that tastes good going down, but in reality is nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated, the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain. The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies—that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.

In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen "Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me.

MARSYAS: There are seven keys to the great gate, Being eight in one and one in eight. First, let the body of thee be still, Bound by the cerements of will, Corpse-rigid; thus thou mayst abort The fidget-babes that tease the thought. Next, let the breath-rhythm be low, Easy, regular, and slow; So that thy being be in tune With the great sea's Pacific swoon. Third, let thy life be pure and calm Swayed softly as a well-to-live be bound To the one love of the Profound. Fifth, let the thought, divinely free From sense, observe its entity. Watch every thought that springs; enhance Hour after hour thy vigilance! Intense and keen, turned inward, miss No atom of analysis! Sixth, on one thought securely pinned Still every whisper of the wind! So like a flame straight and unstirred Burn up thy being in one word! Next, still that ecstasy, prolong Thy meditation steep and strong, Slaying even God, should He distract Thy attention from the chosen act! Last, all these things in one o'erpowered, Time that the midnight blossom flowered! The oneness is. Yet even in this, My son, though shalt not do amiss If thou restrain the expression, shoot Thy glance to rapture's darkling root, Discarding name, form, sight, and stress Even of this high consciousness; Pierce to the heart! I leave thee here: Thou art the Master. I revere Thy radiance that rolls afar, O Brother of the Silver Star!

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