thoroughly.................

 

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.

-George Bernard Shaw, from here

wrestling with catastrophe.............

 

And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.

-Cornell West, as lifted from here

On the lookout.................................

 

............................................for glimmers.

Part of the joy of living......

 

.........is exchanging good books with good friends.

Let’s talk for a minute about the etiquette of gifting books. The etiquette is that you probably shouldn’t do it. First of all, there is a 99% chance that you’re going to gift a book that someone won’t like. You’re gifting it because you like it, but you don’t know what the other person likes, so it will probably sit on a shelf somewhere. Second of all, it’s like gifting someone a vacuum cleaner. Great, but now I have to spend ten hours cleaning the house.

-Jared Dillian

On Camus...........................

 

"I wanted to change lives, yes," Camus wrote when young, "but not the world, which I worshipped as divine."

     His deepest gift, always, had to do with finding the confidence to affirm: "The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death."  His enduring lesson was that the difficulty—the irrationality—of life need not rob us of our joy.  That Sisyphus's efforts will always be fruitless need not mean that his life is wasted.  A plague can awaken heroism and compassion precisely because we are no longer sleepwalking through life.

-Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence

Eternity......................

 

He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

-William Blake

Tanmay Vora...............................

 

............................goes with the flow.

joy...........................

 

Joy is in the doing, not in the outcome after the doing.

 

Do more things you like doing.

-Annie Mueller, from here

Walking with joy..................

 

......................through the valley of the shadow. . .

a product.......................

 

Material possessions can be here today and gone tomorrow, and if your happiness is tied up in them, it too can be here today and gone tomorrow.  But happiness, a product of a mindset that combines curiosity, the joy of perpetual intellectual discovery, and an appreciation of life's experiences, can be more lasting.

-Gad Saad,  The Saad Truth About Happiness

the world......................

Man was made for joy and woe,

And when this we rightly know

Through the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

-William Blake

thanks Rob

choices...........................

 Playing your own game in life means understanding what truly matters to you. It’s about self-awareness and knowing your strengths and weaknesses. It’s about recognizing what brings you joy and what drains you.

-Vishal Khandelwal

     via

an atmosphere of quiet.........

 

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

-Bertrand Russell

Joy..................

 

Joy for the human beings lies in proper human work.  And proper human work consists in: acts of kindness to other human beings, distain for the stirrings of the senses, identifying trustworthy impressions, and contemplating the natural order and all that happens in keeping with it.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations

Recommended...................

      The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation.  More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Live (the ancient art of stoic joy)

it's a process...............

We're often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice.  But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn't to suffer through the daily grind.  It's to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.  It is not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play. . . .

 Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion.  They're usually fueled by what psychologists call harmonious passion.  Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Life its ownself...................................

      This country has felt more stunned and doomed than at any time since the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, and while a sense of foreboding may be appropriate, the hate is not.  At some point, the hate becomes an elective.  I was becoming insane, letting politicians get me whipped up into visions of revenge, perp walks, and jail.  But it didn't work as a drug, neither calming nor animating me.  There is no beauty or safety in hatred.  As a long-term strategy, based on craziness, it's doomed.

     No one can take this hatred off me.  I have to surrender it every time I become aware of it.  This will not go well, I know.  But I don't want my life's ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don't know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years.  Whenever that day comes, I want to be living, insofar as possible, in the Wendell Berry words "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts," . . .

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

accidentally...............................

     As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things towards ourselves, too.  While you might think it's a trick, having affection for one's goofy, crabby, annoying, lovely self is home.  This has been my meager salvation.

     That we are designed for joy is exhilarating, within reach, now or perhaps later today, after a nap, as long as we do not mistake excitement for joy.  Joy is good cheer.  My partner says joy and curiosity are the same thing.  Joy is always a surprise, and often a decision.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Life Its Ownself.......................

 ...........the joys of parenting — and grandparenting:

Highly recommended..........................

 

For all the books on all the shelves of all the world's libraries, life must in the end be lived as a series of discrete moments and individual decisions.  What we face may be complicated, but what we do about it is simple.  "Do the right thing," Laura White told her son.  "Do unto others," a teacher told his disciples, "as you would have them do unto you." . . .

How does one thrive through a maelstrom of change?  By standing on ground that is permanent.