What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know…I felt that by walking away I was abandoning them, that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.
I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on.
Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything. They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.
The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.
tallgirltales:
Love the colors & movement of this skirt. Looks nice as styled, but would also work with a white tank & flat sandals once the temperatures warm up.
Field of Vision Skirt | Anthropologie
Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It wont happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.’
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Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (via noellemichelle)
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dear santa…
God, universe, Allah, Jesus, Mary, all the angels & saints also take a heed.
i don’t want a lot for christmas
i don’t even wish for snow
i just hope and pray you remember
that i really need a job.
13 months have quickly passed
since i’ve had a steady paycheck
and it’s making me a miser…
so the rhyming won’t work as well as i would have liked but here it goes. this is my prayer.
there’s a very distinct possibility that i can get hired by THAT company that i so desperately want to join.
please warm the hearts & minds of those decision-makers that may not be completely sold on me. if this has been a test of wills, although i’m not a clear winner, i have given this fight my very best. no one can contend that.
i have remained positive, glass half-full without very much to go on….and now i implore you to please help me in making this happen. i’ve done what i could and now i leave you to do what i can’t.
please take pity on my soul….
i ask this from the very bottom of my heart.
We’re all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away — our stories. I guess that’s what I love about books. They are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
