When you look at a person, any person, remember that everyone has a story. Everyone has gone through something that has changed them.
Every once in a while — often when we least expect it — we encounter someone more courageous, someone who choose to strive for that which (to us) seemed unrealistically unattainable, even elusive. And we marvel. We swoon. We gape. Often , we are in awe. I think we look at these people as lucky, when in fact, luck has nothing to do with it. It is really about the strength of their imagination; it is about how they constructed the possibilities for their Life. In short, unlike me, they didn’t determine what was impossible before it was even possible.Fail Safe – Debbie Millman’s fantastic illustrated essay of timeless advice on courage and the creative life.
Is it strange to feel guilty when people compliment you and say that you’re a good person, but you’re extremely self aware and know you’re not? There’s a strange feeling of shame when people think you’re better than you are.
Thanks for putting this into words.
Leaving
It hasn’t hit me that I’m going yet.
Sometimes I wonder if it was a good thing that my parents made me move so much when I was a kid, or that my suburban American life was completely uprooted in high school when I was shipped off to Shanghai, or that I’ve chosen to study in a field where most people just happen to be crossing paths, with no guarantee for any see-you-laters. Sometimes I convince myself these have been good character building experiences because, well, they have made it easy to say goodbye. Practice breeds familiarity, after all, and routine tends to be accompanied by very little emotion.
But sometimes I also miss the sentimentality of youth and inexperience. I miss the heartache and sadness that should accompany every parting and wonder how it is I have become so old, how it is I have come to accept that “such is life.” And it is usually when I find myself feeling so removed from it all that some trigger will set me off.
I hope that the friendships and relationships I have been blessed with this semester last. I think I’ve recently redefined for myself what friendship means. In my dictionary, friends were only those I could trust on a very deep, emotional, and personal level. But the world is so, unfathomably, big. I’m starting to realize that a friend is anyone you can pass time with, enjoying their company and knowing that should you ever be in the same city, you will have a place on their couch and a cup of tea from their stove.
I’m really going to miss my life here. Inshallah I’ll see this country again, or at least the people I’ve met in it.
(Source: gunsareevil)
Exactly twenty years after Andrew Sullivan’s seminal essay “The Politics of Homosexuality,” Minnesota state representative Tim Faust (D) delivers an absolutely extraordinary, stirring speech on marriage equality, leading the Minnesota House to pass the same-sex marriage bill with a vote of 79:59.
Well, I have to start by admitting that not too long ago, I probably would have voted ‘no’ on this bill, but in the past there have been a couple things that changed my mind on this… . The question that keeps going through my mind over and over again is, “Do we, as a society, have the right to impose our religious beliefs on somebody else?” A right that I have taken for granted, and most of the people in this room have taken for granted, since the day we realized what the opposite sex is. That is a right I have taken for granted for a long time, and yet some people, because of others’ religious beliefs, do not have that right.
[…]
Last summer, I got married. And, before that, I had dated a woman for four years. And she was a wonderful woman, and I realized, after four years, that I could’ve married her and I would’ve been happily married to her for the rest of my life. But I also realized I could be happy without her. And I decided, after four years, that I wasn’t going to marry somebody I could live with — if I got married again, it was going to be to somebody I could not live without. And so we broke up.
And in a few months, I met my wife. And it didn’t take me very long to realize this was somebody I could not live without. And how lucky I am, how lucky we are. And yet, in this state, there are people that feel that way about each other, that cannot live without that other person, that feel the same way they do about each other that I feel about my wife — and yet, because of religious beliefs of other people, they do not have the right that I have taken for granted since the day I realized what the opposite sex was.
Finals
After nearly two days straight of self-imprisonment due to finals, I appealed to my friend via Facebook for some news of the outside world - as a joke, obviously. His response served as a bright, bright 2-second reprieve from this madness:
M:
tell me what the outside world is like…
P:
Its a cold dark depressing place. Instead of the soft warming light of your light bulbs you instead have the dreary depression of inadequate street lamps and brief (and night vision killing) flashes of passing cars.
Rather than the friendly comfort of your roommate you have shabab and creepy old men.
…
Also loud construction.
(Source: creatingaquietmind)
