Being Us
hands in the cave, habit of exaggerating, our future selves, kindness, and cleaning up
Hello Dear Reader,
Thank you for joining me. I hope you are doing well.
Today I want to share some quotes with you and an old article. I came across these sayings at different points in my life and noted them down. The past week, while searching for drafts of old writing and travel notes I needed for personal essays, I discovered these quotes again and just had to share them. They are eye-opening, relevant, and practical.
So here we go.
“What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come. Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.”
Seneca
A photograph I clicked in Mandi town, Himachal Pradesh last year.
The world is so huge, so unpredictable, what all will we worry about?
But most of our worries are rooted inside us. And so Kurt Cobain rightly said,
Wanting to be someone else is the waste of a person you are.
We wouldn’t even know how the other person we admire feels about her life. Because only she knows how it is to be her.
If we want to know how a person feels, we must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is one and only one observer stationed at the critical point of view. She may not always remember what she felt before, and she may not always be aware of what she is feeling right now. We may be puzzled by her reports, skeptical of her memory, and worried about her ability to use language as we do. But when all our hand wringing is over, we must admit that she is the only person who has even the slightest chance of describing ‘the view from in here’, which is why her claims serve as the gold standard against which all other measures are measured.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling Upon Happiness
My Aymara host on an island in Lake Titicaca, Peru. She could be sixty, but her ever-present smile was like of a little girl’s.
Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
And a couple more from the amazing Daniel Gilbert on the science of happiness,
Studies demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.
We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.
For this week’s letter,
Some of my writing,
quotes I love,
and
things to read.
Articles From the Past
33 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self
Thirty-three things I didn’t know back then.
Read the letter now. Or Pocket for later.
What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been reading short stories, books, articles, and so much more. I can’t possibly list all what I have read in the past week so I’m putting down the things I found most relevant and worthwhile.
Enlightening and beautiful reads from the week,
a huge list of common misconceptions by Wikipedia.
The poem Kindness written by Naomi Shihab Nye (I cannot share the poem here because of copyrights.) But you can read it here on On Being.
A little expert from the poem,
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
It is completely upto us to pick up the beauty or the ugliness from the world around us, but whether to let the filth stay or clean it up is never a choice.
Yours Truly
Somewhere in Vietnam, September 2022.
Thank you for reading.
I hope you have a great rest of the week. Take good care of yourselves :)
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Yours,
Priyanka
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science and arts had similar progression all over the continents just as today even 10000 years back , similar hands in famous french caves around same era.so apart from communication, 'being human' factor had always been in play.