I save these the way other people save recipes: a line that lands, a thing I noticed, a fragment of self-knowledge. For a long time that is all they were, a pile. Then I read the pile and found one argument running through every single one.
It is the move from anxious control to secure presence. From gripping and testing and bracing and trying to decode the outcome, to showing up, feeling all of it, and keeping what wakes me up. I tried to control my life and my love, and both of them taught me to be present instead.
The primitives
Show up, don't control.
Presence over outcome. My job is to be here, not to manage how it ends.
Nothing is wasted.
Every chapter has value. If they leave, thank them for it.
Feelings are data or fear.
Learn which is which before you act on either.
Lessons repeat until you learn them.
What you won't deal with comes back, uglier.
Boundaries from having had none.
The most boundaried people used to have none at all.
Keep what woke you.
You keep the parts of yourself a person revealed, even after they go.
Notice life together.
The purest love is wanting someone to notice life with you.
Accept the irreducible.
Love the distance you cannot bridge instead of fighting it.
I have watched How I Met Your Mother more times than I will admit, and the lesson that stuck is the one holding this whole page together: the scars of what happened to you do not have to stay scars. You can paint over them in the loudest colors you have, your imagination, your stubbornness, your will to love your life exactly as it was, and as it is. The fragments here are the scars. Studying them is how I paint.
The love face of the same argument lives on On Love.
And the value that makes any of it possible: leaving ego at the door.
Lines I’ve kept about how to live, each one held up to the light: what it’s really saying, and whether it survives the check.
“The meaning of life is just finding things you like doing and people you like spending time with, and spending as much of your life as possible on those two things.”
a saved line
The study
Reads like a fridge magnet, and then the longest study of human life we have agrees with it. Harvard has followed the same people for 85 years, and the single best predictor of a happy, healthy life is not money or achievement, it is the quality of your relationships; strong ties move your odds of being alive at the end about as much as quitting smoking does. So the line is not naive. It is the finding with the citations stripped off. Find the things and the people, and spend your life there.
Sources Harvard Study of Adult Development (relationships and a good life) · Yerkes-Dodson law (pressure and performance) · Piff & Keltner, 2015 (awe and the small self) · Epictetus, the Enchiridion (non-attachment) · Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things.
Disappointment.
Being unkind.
Failing someone because I didn’t consider.
Forgetting my place.
Bad with uncertainty.
I struggle with the idea of having capacity for someone. I don’t have extreme capacity but I pretend I do.
I have a degree in expressing feelings.
My vice is tardiness.
I’m an elite runner. If you tell me to go, I run as fast as I can. I ran too fast at the beginning and started to falter, and if no one tells me to adjust, I don’t. At some point you’re just saying: guys, I ran twenty-four miles, can someone bring me some water for the love of god.
How I work, and what I forget to ask for.
I’m not gonna pretend like I had it together. I didn’t.
An Argentinian princess makes the soldiers wait. The last one leaves because he says: if it were love, you wouldn’t have made me wait.
Someone once said looking at me was a sin against god. Never forget that.
Desiree said after the Donner party lesson she wouldn’t eat my legs but yes the rest of my body, because my legs were all messed up from mosquito bites.
Am disproportionately afraid of mosquitoes. They cause me great anxiety.
Compliments I like: you’re smart. You’re funny. I like how you speak.
WAY MORE than “you’re pretty.” Duh.
It’s so expressed — theatre.
I built this place alongside the best people in my life.
It’s not that style is over substance. It’s that it’s pertinent to recognize how style informs substance.
I do not believe in absolutes. “All X are this.”
Seeing where you do it wrong is the most helpful thing, honestly. It tells me where to actually push.
Life and work are all the same thing.