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Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally," writes Kabat-Zinn. "This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality."
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Will Schwalbe |
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We found ourselves discussing the three kinds of fateful choices that exist in the two books: the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can't; and the ones they make thinking they can't and only later come to understand, when it's too late, when "nothing can be undone," that they could have. Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility--that i..
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Will Schwalbe |
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Mom went on to tell me, as we sat there, that she really believed your personal life was personal. Secrets, she felt, rarely explained or excused anything in real life, or were even all that interesting. People shared too much, she said, not too little. She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Often we feel the need to say that a book isn't just about a particular time or place but is about the human spirit. People say this of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, or Night by Elie Wiesel, or A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.
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Will Schwalbe |
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book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,
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Will Schwalbe |
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Mom also believed that there is such a thing as a good secret. Maybe something kind you did for someone but didn't want that person to know, because you didn't want him to be embarrassed or feel as though he owed you anything. I thought back to a Harvard student of Mom's, an aspiring playwright who won an award to travel in Europe--but the award didn't exist. Mom had simply paid, anonymously, for him to have enough money to go on what turne..
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Will Schwalbe |
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The thing about Americans," she said, "is that you're very concerned about everything all the time." Mom"
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Will Schwalbe |
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Mom's reaction to this chaos isn't a surprise. No matter how high the bill that she is paying or that Medicare is paying for her, she will say to me or herself: "What happens to all the people who can't afford this? It's just not fair." Universal"
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Will Schwalbe |
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I needed to remind myself that good news and bad news are often relative to your expectations, not anything absolute.
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Will Schwalbe |
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I flipped open to read the marked passage in Daily Strength: "It is not by regretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, but by making the best of what we are. It is not by complaining that we have not the right tools, but by using well the tools we have. What we are, and where we are, is God's providential arrangement--God's doing, though it may be man's misdoing; and the manly and the wise way is to look your disadvantages ..
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Will Schwalbe |
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The poem begins, "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along."
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Will Schwalbe |
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For me, there's something about planes that isolates and intensifies sadness, the way a looking glass can magnify the sun until it grows unbearably hot and burns.
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Will Schwalbe |
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We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it's not owing like a debt to one person--it's really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant--so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up--and each expression of friendship or love m..
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Will Schwalbe |
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You don't need a reason to do what you do for love.
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Will Schwalbe |
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I become influenced while I'm reading. I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life.
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Will Schwalbe |
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We can't do much for the people we've lost, but we can remember them and we can read for them: the books they loved, and books we think they might have chosen. Maybe the reading can help us answer the questions they would have asked us if they were still here to ask them. Maybe the reading can help us figure out how to honor their lives and continue their legacies.
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Will Schwalbe |
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After reading , I vowed that I would take a trip to my room every few months, and these have been some of the happiest days I've spent. It's an incredible luxury to be home and not sick, to wake up with no agenda other than to wander around the apartment all day. I can lie on the sofa and look at the light as it plays across the glass table. Or see the way it catches on a cracked ceramic vase. I can play with the shells I've brought back f..
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Will Schwalbe |
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I'm on a search--and have been, I now realize, all my life--to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I'm at it.
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Will Schwalbe |
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I believe that everything you need to know you can find in a book. People have always received life-guiding wisdom from certain types of nonfiction, often from "self-help" books . . . . But I have found that all sorts of books can carry this kind of wisdom; a random sentence in a thriller will give me an unexpected insight. (If I hadn't read , the masterful 1997 novel that introduced the world to Jack Reacher, a former military cop turned ..
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Will Schwalbe |
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But missing people and being lonely, she pointed out, are two separate things.
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Will Schwalbe |
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It was a passage about a fifty-fifth high school reunion. It began: The list of our deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or bony-cronehood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead. It continued: But we don't see ourselves that way, as lame ..
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Will Schwalbe |
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I spend my life collecting books and sentences from them: I've sought alongside ones I've stumbled across, and sentences I've forced into my brain through rote memorization alongside ones that just found their way by themselves. At home, I'm a librarian, forever curating my collection. Outside of my apartment, I'm a bookseller--hand-selling my favorite books to everyone I encounter. There's a name for someone who behaves the way I do: Reade..
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Will Schwalbe |
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I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Connectivity is one thing; connectivity is another. . . . Constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature. None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names Impatience or Distraction. Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can't interrupt them; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading the..
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Will Schwalbe |
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There's one question I think we should ask of one another a lot more often, and that's "What are you reading?" It's a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives, creating a shared universe for people who are otherwise separated by culture and age and by time and space. . . . When we ask one another "What are you reading?" sometimes we discover the ways that we are similar; sometimes the ways that we are different. Sometime..
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Will Schwalbe |
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She always read the end of a book first because she couldn't wait to find out how things would turn out.
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Will Schwalbe |
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I do believe that my Holy Grail of books could be out there--and I intend to keep reading until I find it. Of course, I'll keep reading after I do, too, because--well, because I love to read. I also believe that the Holy Grail of books won't be the greatest book ever written--I am certain there isn't such a thing. I think it will simply be a book that speaks perfectly to me at the moment I most need it and continues to speak to me for the r..
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Will Schwalbe |
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bb0a2f0
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She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose--electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio--is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they're how we know what we need to do..
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Will Schwalbe |
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there's something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don't know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.
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Will Schwalbe |
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3b8b589
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a book by David K. Reynolds, who had, in the early 1980s, come up with a system he called Constructive Living, a Western combination of two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.
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Will Schwalbe |
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You can leave the books that you don't like alone, and let other people read them- ancient scholar Yuan Chunglang
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Will Schwalbe |
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Every hospital is, as I've noted, an interruption machine--a flood of people come to poke you and prod you and ask you questions.
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Will Schwalbe |
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A 'C' means you've done average work. There's nothing shameful about being average. You didn't fail. You didn't even come close. You did what you were supposed to do. Cheerfully accepting the C means that you recognize there's such a thing as a B and an A and that you know you fell short of both; you can take pride in your place n the middle of the pack but still appreciate that there's room to grow. Mediocrity isn't crass or shoddy or vulg..
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Will Schwalbe |
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When we denigrate mediocrity, we discourage ourselves and others from trying new things. It would be great to be a great painter, but it's also great just to paint. Or sing or throw pots or knit scarves or play chess.
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Will Schwalbe |
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Even if the stars are obliterated by light there are beautiful things to see all around us, and we can't be bothered. But its not because we are ill, most of us. Or because it's too cold. Or because we are blind with love. Ore even because we spend so much time looking at little screens. It's because we are often so busy and distracted and self-absorbed that we can't be bothered to see what is right in front of us, in our rooms, on our stre..
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Will Schwalbe |
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That's the point, Will. You can't control the beatings. But maybe you can have some control over your happiness.
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Will Schwalbe |
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That's the point, Will. You can't control the beatings. But maybe you can have some control over your happiness. As long as he can, well then, he still has something worth living for. And when he's no longer able, he knows he's done all he can.
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Will Schwalbe |
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45a332d
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We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it's not owing like a debt to one person--it's really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant--so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up--and each expression of friendship or love m..
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Will Schwalbe |