On Starting Over

A lot can happen in two years.

At the age of 30, I'm starting from scratch.
A few weeks ago, I quit my job, moved out of my apartment in New York City, and packed up a suitcase and moved to London, a city that had always loomed large and beautiful in my mind. A place I'd often thought, dreamed, talked about. And now I'm here.

It is at once surreal and challenging. Surreal because it's still sinking in, and at first, I found myself gliding on the surface of the moment vs. actually being in the moment. (Sometimes, your brain needs to catch up to your actions, though of late, I quite prefer this than the other way around - I tend to overthink things.) And challenging because it's quite lonely to be on one's own and not have any choice in the matter. 

A few nights ago, I fell asleep listening to British / Irish philosopher-poet David Whyte wax poetic about the need for solitude but also the need to belong. I woke up remembering lines wondering if I'd dreamed them. It was a nice to wake up that way. 

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

From "Sweet Darkness" - David White

I found these lines comforting because they're true, which means my decision must have been the right one...that my other life was too small for me and I needed to ask more of the world.

But these are also lines that hover, because I want to continue to live up to them.
Why is this harder than it should be?

Because "alive" doesn't mean comfort, routine, familiarity. Because "alive" could also mean discomfort, vulnerability, and fear.

It takes a brave soul to dive headfirst into it anyway.  

Live Anyway.

Richard Curtis on Love

Today, I went to a director's talk with Richard Curtis (writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral / Notting Hill, Writer / Director of Love Actually), and he said these words about love:

Love is like cooking a steak. You have to first sear it at a very high heat to seal in all the goodness / juices, before you turn the heat down to cook it through.

Eight words

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I think this is true

“Life’s passion can be eliminated through detached contemplation.” —Czeslaw Milosz http://t.co/WI5iiFPw14
— The Paris Review (@parisreview) August 8, 2013

A few true words to start your morning

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.” ―Thomas Mann

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Don't Waste Time. Start Now.

Loved Debbie Millman's Commencement speech....
"If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now."
 


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A Nice Reminder

THIS IS WATER - By David Foster Wallace
from The Glossary on Vimeo.

Expanding the Parameters

“If I read a book, go to a play, see a painting, or hear a piece of music that makes me expand the parameters of my response — makes me think differently, makes me think more completely about something — then I’ve had a useful experience. Otherwise, as I said, it’s merely decorative and a waste of time.” — Edward Albee in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, 2005

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Rules to Follow, to Break

Wise advice from artist and educator Sister Corita Kent for a class she taught at Immaculate Heart College in 1967-1968. Hand-written by Lisa Congdon.

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John Cleese / On Creativity

ON PROCRASTINATION / DISTRACTIONS:
"As we all know, it's easier to do trivial things that are urgent, than it is to do important things that are not urgent– like thinking. And it is also easier to do things we know we can do than start on big things that we're not sure about." 

So true!

This John Cleese talk on creativity is an old one but a very good one.

Every, Every Minute

EMILY:
Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it– every, every minute?

from Thornton Wilder's classic Our Town
 

Happy New Year

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"Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life as a dog does his master’s chair. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good—be good for something."   

Henry David Thoreau

What is love?

Five answers.


(image from the umbrellas of cherbourg / koch-lorber films)

Definition of the Day

Beware of the Muddle

It seems to me that I'm in a bit of a muddle - about most things regarding my life.

Decisiveness is the virtue I most envy at the moment.

It's a dangerous place to be - as good Mr. Emerson of Forster's A Room with a View tells us.

Hope to climb out of this one soon – Onward!

Happy Friday!

Definition of the Day

Saw this on the OED twitter feed the other day. It stuck with me:

Nothing is Stranger, More Delicate...

Years ago, I found this excerpt about the delicate relationship between strangers plastered onto a table in a little coffee shop in Boston. It was such a present to find first thing in the morning! The words have stayed with me ever since.

Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight - who encounter and observe each other daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled by the constraint of convention or by their own temperament to keep up the pretense of being indifferent to strangers, neither greeting nor speaking to each other. Between them is uneasiness and overstimulated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and to communicate; and above all, too, a kind of strained respect. For man loves and respects his fellow man for as long as he is not yet in a position to evaluate him, and desire is born of defective knowledge.

DEATH IN VENICE, Thomas Mann

Hats + Books

"Something Wicked This Way Comes" - Ray Bradbury

About Art

''We'd often go to the movies. We'd shiver as the screen lit up. But more often we'd be disappointed. The images flickered. Marilyn Monroe looked terribly old. It saddened us. It wasn't the film we dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts; the film we wanted to make, and, secretly, wanted to live."   
Goddard:: Masculine, Feminine 

"I believe that today, more than ever, a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it.  We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul." 
Miller :: Tropic of Cancer