I’d run my whole life long to reach you; paddle my way across Atlantic and Pacific; traverse Jungle and Desert to find you; climb cliffs and drop from the sky to rescue you. Anything to be close to you. Any way to say I love you.
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.Albert Camus, from “Notebooks, 1951-1959”
Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it. And by doing it, they’re proven right. Because, I think there’s something inside of you—and inside of all of us—when we see something and we think, “I think I can do it, I think I can do it. But I’m afraid to.” Bridging that gap, doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that—THAT is what life is. And I think you might be really good. You might find out something about yourself that’s special. And if you’re not good, who cares? You tried something. Now you know something about yourself. Now you know. A mystery is solved. So, I think you should just give it a try. Just inch yourself out of that back line. Step into life. Courage. Risks. Yes. Go. Now.
Amy Poehler
Life always give us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor, every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every breath. Every moment is the guru.
Charlotte Joko Beck
I need more than fragments, selfish though it may be, if I want you, I need to have all of you, the crossroads are empty, save for the inconsiderate wants of a bipolar romantic, but meeting halfway is not an option, as only half of you, will never satiate enough.
What I hate is ignorance, smallness of imagination, the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes. All things are possible. Who you are is limited only by who you think you are
Egyptian Book of the Dead
Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
Aristotle
Our view of ourselves is a complicated thing, and a complex issue with far reaching repercussions on our lives. For as much as we hope to see ourselves clearly, no man alive sees the truth in himself. Or of himself, for that matter.
Every relationship we have is a mirror that reflects an opinion we take as truth. With every smile from a pretty girl, or rebuttal, we continue to paint this picture of who we are. A complex bit of art, we paint it, paint over it, making an image in our heads of our strengths and weaknesses, our skills, our talents, our flaws.
We wake up each day, and see an image in the mirror, and we dress that image according to who we hope to be, and often times who we rue being. We compensate, and overcompensate, adding solemnity to our wardrobes to balance the immaturity we fear to expose, or adding youth to disguise our creeping age. It is a complex thing that I fear I will never see through, and will be repainting my entire life.
I like to imagine that once we would have been guided in our presentation by our fathers and grandfathers, from the clothing we were bought as children to the first suit we’d have made at our fathers tailor. But that is a world far removed from my own, and an age I only read about.
The truth is that modern dressing isn’t directed by our fathers, giving texture and colour according to their understanding of what the world sees as appropriate, giving flair and personality for the character traits someone that proud of us sees above all else. Rather we are taught how we should appear by the airbrushed perfection of marketing, taught how we should dress by idolizing a far distant and removed designer.
The rules of men’s dressing, a spoken history of men’s clothing passed from father to son from one generation to the next, seems to have been dealt a mortal blow by the emergence of fashion, brand and designer. The rules change season in and season out to make each previous season obsolete, to make each new season sale able and every previous wardrobe an embarrassment. Men who are trying to see themselves accurately are left with no clue as to how they should dress themselves, and the guidelines on dressing for the world and its occasions are a daunting mystery. These men give up chasing the moving target of fashion, and believe that it is correct for them to hate dressing, shopping and exploring this image of themselves.
So it is such an empowering thing to have the power shifted back in to our own hands. To have a tailor, or a haberdasher, or a shoe maker that can give us the rules back, demystify dressing by taking out the designer and giving each man an understanding of how to dress for his body, life, personality, career.
A great tailor makes a man look at his best, builds him a uniform to play with as his moods see fit, and a framework of understanding to make, hopefully, very few mistakes. The man who thinks himself too short or stout or frail or plain can see clothing take shape that emphasizes his strengths, and his only. His colouring dictates the colours he wears, the cut of his clothing hides the parts of him he dislikes.
Hopefully he looks in his mirror each day and sees a myriad of options to be the man he hopes to be, and in his wardrobe he sees the means to paint an amazing picture of himself. If only for himself, and it really should be for ourselves that we dress, to have a positive self image and the tools to make it better is a very liberating position.
The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.
Friedrich Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, Part I, Section Nine
