101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“The worst happened, and then it passed. You lost the person you thought you couldn’t live without and then you kept living. You lost your job then found another one. You began to realize that “safety” isn’t in certainty—but in faith that you can simply keep going.”

“Everything is hard in some way. It’s hard to be in the wrong relationship. It’s hard to be in the right one. It’s hard to be broke and miserable, it’s hard to achieve your dreams. It’s hard to be stuck in the middle, not really feeling anything at all. Everything is hard, but you choose your hard. You choose what’s worth it. You don’t choose whether or not you’ll suffer, but you do choose what you want to suffer for.”

“The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.”

“At the end of the day, all we really want are a few close people who know us (and love us) no matter what.”

“Nobody cries at a funeral because the world will be missing out on another pretty face. They cry because the world is missing another heart, another soul, another person. Don’t wait until it’s too late to focus on what will actually matter: creating something that lasts far beyond your body.”

“A friend once told me that the secret to finding love was not to actually look for it, but to heal the things that were preventing you from seeing and receiving it. I think the biggest one of all is, “What will having this love fix?”What will having this person next to me make me feel better about? What do I need them to tell me? What do I need them to prove? Who do I need them to look great in front of? What purpose do they serve for my ego?”

“You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do. Because experience is always multi-dimensional, there are a variety of memories, experiences, feelings, “gists” you can choose to recall…and what you choose is indicative of your present state of mind. So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the storyline of your personal evolution.”

“The universe whispers until it screams, and happy people listen while the call is still quiet”

“Make a list of all the imperfect people you’ve known in your life who have had love. Who have had romantic partners and best friends and jobs you could only ever dream of. Make a list of all the people who are conventionally unattractive and spiritually adrift and imperfect and all the things each one of them had despite being that way. Make it your own personal proof that you do not need to be perfect to be good enough.”

“Your impermanence is a thing you should meditate on every day: There is nothing more sobering, nor scary, nor a faster-way-to-cut-the-negative-bullshit than to remember that you do not have forever. What defines your life, when it’s all said and done, is how much you influence other people’s lives, oftentimes just through your daily interactions and the courage with which you live your own. That’s what people remember. That’s what you will be known for when you’re no longer around to define yourself.”

“When you start considering things not as obligations but as opportunities, you start taking advantage of them rather than trying to avoid them.”

“People delay action once they know truth—and the interim between knowing and doing is the space where suffering thrives. Most of the time, it’s not about not knowing what to do (or not knowing who you are). It’s about the resistance between what’s right and what’s easy, what’s best in the long v. short term. We hear our instincts; we just don’t listen. This is the single most common root of discomfort: the space between knowing and doing. We’re culturally addicted to procrastination, but we’re also just as enamored by deflection. By not acting immediately, we think we’re creating space for the truth to shift, when we’re really only creating discomfort so that we can sense it more completely (though we’re suffering needlessly in the process).”

“You’re one of those people who tries to find comfort in overanalyzing old things to make more sense of them, when in reality, complexity is a product of insecurity, and insecurity a product of being unable to accept the simple reality of the situation”

“Happiness is not how many things you do, but how well you do them. More is not better. Happiness is not experiencing something else; it’s continually experiencing what you already have in new and different ways.”

“There is no such thing as letting go; there’s just accepting what’s already gone. There’s losing ourselves in the labyrinth of the illusion of control and finding joy in the chaos, even when it’s uncomfortable. It’s not forever. It only remains as long as we hold on. As long as we fight. As long as we control. As long as we don’t accept what’s already gone.”

“Whatever you feel you are not receiving is a direct reflection of what you are not giving. Whatever you are angered by is what you aren’t willing to see in yourself.So where you feel you are lacking, you must give. Where there is tension, you must unpack. If you want more recognition, recognize others. If you want love, be more loving. Give exactly what you want to get.”

“Being in love with somebody that you only used to know is like falling in love with a book (which sounds like a dumb example but people really do fall in love with them). The point is: You can love it all you want, but it’s a story that runs parallel to yours. At the end of the day it’s static. It’s memory. It’s a sentence and you can’t change it. It ends how it ends. It says what it says.”

“The obsessive desire for a passionate relationship is usually a reflection of a lack of love for oneself. The manic need to pursue a passionate career is rooted in an intense unhappiness with present reality. They are a series of soothing thoughts and deflection methods and escape routes: The monster everyone’s running from, of course, is themselves.”

“Make time for the friends you have more than you seek out the ones you don’t. Stop counting how many people are in your life as though hitting a certain tally will make you feel loved. Start appreciating how rare and beautiful it is to even just have one close friend in life. Not everybody is so lucky.”

“An untamed mind is a minefield.”

“Everything you do, see, and feel is a reflection of not who you are, but how you are. You create what you believe. You see what you want. You’ll have what you give.”

“There are two mindsets people tend to have: explorer or settler. Our society has a “settler” mindset, our end goals are “finalizing” (home, marriage, career, etc.) in a world that was made for evolution, in selves that do nothing but grow and expand and change. People with “explorer” mindsets are able to actually enjoy what they have and experience it fully because they are inherently unattached”

“Work on closing the gap between who the world thinks you are and who you know you are. Your mental health will change significantly.”

“What qualities you admire most in other people. (This is what you most like about yourself.)”

“To fully accept your life—the highs, lows, good, bad—is to be grateful for all of it, and to know that the “good” teaches you well, but the “bad” teaches you better.”

“lack of routine is just a breeding ground for perpetual procrastination.”

“The path to a greater life is not “suffering until you achieve something,” but letting bits and pieces of joy and gratitude and meaning and purpose gradually build, bit by bit.”

“If we could see souls instead of bodies, what would be beautiful?What is the first thing people would know about you? What would you bemost afraid of them seeing? Who would you impress? Who would youlove?What would you adjust as you walked past the mirror? What kind of workwould you be in? What would your goals be, how would you strive to bebetter if what you collected in the bank or put on your body or attached nextto your name on a business card no longer affected what people saw?Would you spend your time in gyms and stores or in libraries andtemples? Who would you let yourself fall in love with? What would your“type” be? Tall, dark, and handsome or creative, kind, and self-aware?What would happen if we could see people not as “bad,” but as…blocked? If we could see the ways they’ve packed away their pain, or howthey hold a belief that keeps them away from being kind to others?What would happen if we realized our bodies never wanted anything morethan to feel connected, and acted out on nothing more than their false ideasof being separate, different, exiled, the odd one out, the almost-but-notgood-enough?What would happen if we embraced our desire to play out and finaglewith our individualism, but eventually returned to the knowing that we areall just energy fields? And where would we be if we realized that we wereall from the same one? What would happen if we realized we really weren’tthat different at all?”

“Your identity does not have to be cohesive. Your story doesn’t have to flow. You don’t have to be neatly packaged in a way that other people understand. You have to stop living for your synopsis, the summary we try to piece together in our minds when we imagine people explaining us or evaluating who we are. It doesn’t have to make sense. You’re allowed to be great at a lot of things that don’t necessarily relate to one another. You’re not limited to just one purpose, one talent, one love. You can have a variety of jobs, each of them meaningful at the time you have them. You can be good at a lot of things without lacking in others. You do not have to be a novel; you can be a book of stories.”

“don’t confuse a bad feeling for a bad life.”