Poor documents are so commonplace that deciphering bad writing and bad visual design have become part of the coping skills needed to navigate in the so-called Information Age.
Poor documents are so commonplace that deciphering bad writing and bad visual design have become part of the coping skills needed to navigate in the so-called Information Age.
(1/2) Maybe love shouldn‘t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can‘t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don‘t fit, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like …
That‘s life. You‘re always making decisions, taking paths that lead you away from the rest before you can see where they end. Maybe that‘s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we‘ll never have.
This is why crushes are terrible. You go from feeling like life is a flat path one needs only to cruise over to spending every second on an incline, or caught in a weightless, stomach-in-your throat drop. It‘s Mom running out to catch a cab, hair curled and smiling lips painted, only to come home with streaks of mascara down her face. Highs and lows, and nothing in between.
It‘s never taken effort - that‘s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface.
“A good bookstore,” Charlie says, “is like an airport where you don‘t have to take your shoes off.”
“I understand. I can be patient. I‘ve tried, will try to be patient. But I need … something. I need you to understand that this is not a book you‘re writing. We‘re not - not two characters you can keep apart because it makes for a literary ending. These are our lives, Bee.”
“Why can‘t everyone be like you?”
“I can be enough of your world that it feels like everyone is.”
She does not know if it was love, or simply a reprieve. If contentment can compete with passion, if warmth will ever be as strong as heat.
It was just so ... permanent. Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?
(2/2) There is an awkward silence that fills the space between people who don't know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don't know where or how to start.
(1/2) There are a hundred kinds of silence. There's the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying. There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves.
Time moves so fucking fast. Blink, and you're halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times before finally ending up in theology, and for a while it seems like the right path, but that's really just a reflex to the pride on your parents' face.
He's tried to be a morning person, and on the rare occasion he's managed to get up before dawn, it was a thrill: to watch the day begin, to feel, at least for a little while, like he was ahead instead of behind.
All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say - but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more. The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs.
March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring - though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don't know what you'll find, until you step outside.
I don‘t try to stop. I let the tears fall. I cry for the girl I used to be. I cry for me. It‘s a foreign experience. Self-pity is not an indulgence that I allow myself. This doesn‘t feel like pity, though. It feels like self-compassion, and the realisation makes me cry harder.
Her suggestion that I try it with family, however, is ridiculous. Family is not safe. Not for me. Tough love is brutally honest and hurts you to help you. Tough love cuts you when you‘re already bruised and berates you when you don‘t heal faster.
How much of what people say is genuine and how much is politeness? Is anyone really living their life or are we all reading lines from a giant script by other people?
If you must use these services, however, and you hope to do so without ceding authority over your time and attention, it‘s crucial to understand that this is not a casual decision. You‘re instead waging a David and Goliath battle against institutions that are both impossibly rich and intent on using this wealth to stop you from winning.
He wanted to be out in the gale, warring with waves, battling their impact, witnessing nature at her angriest. Watching as she changed her mind in a matter of seconds. Maybe humans couldn‘t change, but nature could. Nature lived to change.
But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws- the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip.
“Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing, or, now, forgetting.”
And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few more modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why - which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache, most of us, for as long as we happen to be alive.
“If you want to know the truth,” he says, squinting against the glare, “I think people within the religion - people who live here in Colorado City - are probably happier, on the whole, than people on the outside.” He looks down at the red sand, scowls, and nudges a rock with the toe of one shoe. “But some things in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”
“I live with the guilt. But there are two kinds of guilt, girl: the kind that drowns you until you‘re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.”
Life is made of so many moments that mean nothing. Then one day, a single moment comes along to define every second that comes after.
“I agree. They did nothing wrong.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn‘t be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn‘t be God. There‘s more to everything than we can know.”
Reflecting on something that hurts you only prolongs your pain, and when death is involved, the pain is often compounded by a relentless sense of guilt that attacks the moment you start to heal, as if duration of grief somehow proves the depth of your love for the person you lost.
The dream of leaving the rat race to start a farm, or otherwise live in harmony with the land, is the perennial fantasy of the cubicle-bound.
(2/2) As any mathematician will admit, this stretching feels much different than applying a technique you‘ve already mastered, which can be quite enjoyable. But this stretching, as any mathematician will also admit, is the precondition to getting better. This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good”. If you‘re not uncomfortable, then you‘re probably stuck in an “acceptable level”.
(1/2) I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like, as it matches my own experience with the activity. When I‘m learning a new mathematical technique - a classic case of deliberate practice - the uncomfortable sensation in my head is best approximated as a physical strain, as if my neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations.
I lie in the sea and feel more lost than ever, because I‘m not meant to be homesick, I‘m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave. It isn‘t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.
I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there‘s a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style, park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with.
Be wary of men with something to prove.
The way Evelyn is having so much fun with this, the way she seems to delight in shocking me, lets me know that this is, at least a little bit, a power play. She likes to be cavalier about things that would change other people‘s lives. Isn‘t that the very definition of power? Watching people kill themselves over something that means nothing to you?
“I hate you, you know.”
Evelyn nods. “Good for you. It‘s such an uncomplicated feeling, isn‘t it? Hatred?”
Instead she skims the news for emerging facts about the investigation, and it‘s as she expected: nothing. Because fear and corruption work in tandem to censor people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice. There will be no evidence, no due process, no vindication.
When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.
The quiet made her realise how much noise there was elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had meaning. You heard something and you had to pay attention.
She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn‘t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature, solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment. You feel like you are robbing people of something.
Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don‘t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.
These were tears of rage at those in comfortable places who had tossed about words like “patience” with self-satisfaction. Patience: “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay.” To my ears, sitting on those steps that morning, listening to the cheers of the living, I understood “patience” in a new way—as a word that deserves no comfortable home in a nation that has yet to fulfill its promise of liberty and justice for all.
Because I now understood that good things could come from making the right kind of trouble. And from this moment on, I knew I had it in me to embody the noble title of “troublemaker.”
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
She laughed for his sake, something she‘d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.
“Our worst critics prefer to stay” is, while perhaps not outright uplifting, a wonderfully concise acknowledgement of the paradox that a capitalist democracy inevitably is: a place that is often well worth complaining about, and which allows you to complain as loudly as you wish.
Were the pyramids as tall as this building, did the pharaohs sit on top and take the measure of their kingdoms, to see how diminished the world became when you gained the proper distance?