Quotes
When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:
- something needs to change here
- this is urgent
- I don't know how to do it
death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it's a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don't have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that's likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.
you don't really want to die per se but it's also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it's urgent. you don't know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.
Over the years, I've learned that the urge to kill myself isn't bad or wicked. It's scary, but it's just a signpost.
Hello, Cruel World by Kate Bornstein, page 76
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Eugene Gendlin
And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us, we can cope with that.
Welcome to Night Value, episode 12: "The Candidate"
JudgeJudyOfficial:
stop letting miserable people on the internet convince you that you must have a concrete, well-constructed opinion on everything that has ever existed.supreme-leader-stoat:
I am trying to operate under what I'm calling Pascal's Wager of Hope. If things are going to end terribly and I try anyway, I've lost nothing, but if things could end well and I do nothing, I've made a grievous error. All my effort right could be in vain, but it also could not be, and that possibility means I should place my wager on hope.
@coela2616 in a YouTube comments section
Tyler Alterman
People are playing life as if it's a linear narrative-driven game when it's actually an open world game.nicole
once I emailed a 90-year-old poet because i found one of her old books in a bookstore and it culminated in me being at her next book launch at some tulane professor's gorgeous home in new orleans. send cold emails! life might happen!!
@TylerAlterman and @itsnicolefegan on Twitter