If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

– Rudyard Kipling

https://youtu.be/Z-cT8Qe7y3k

“”Never give up!
Always be yourself.”
It’s gonna suck hearing that over and over as you get older
But as stereotypes start with a grain of truth
Cliches begin with a boulder”

– George Watsky, Letter to My 16-Year-Old Self

“Time will tell”, “A diamond in the rough”, “Haste makes waste”, “Time heals all wounds”, “All that glitters isn’t gold”. They’re lines we hear over and over in life. They become a quip and lose the meaning behind them. The line above from Watsky is one of my favorites. It’s a reminder that there’s a reason you hear these lines over and over again. There’s a tremendous amount of truth behind them. It’s good to step back every now and then and appreciate the meaning behind the common sayings we hear all the time.

“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe; to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it, is a wonder beyond words.”

– Joanna Macy

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”

– Frida Kahlo

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

– Richard Feynman

“Our prison is constructed from a lifetime of Shoulds, the world of choices we’ve unwittingly agreed to, the walls that alienate us from our truest, most authentic selves. Should is the doorkeeper to Must. And just as you create your prison, you can set yourself free.”

– Elle Luna

“We build too many walls and not enough bridges”

– Isaac Newton

Sometimes in life we find ourselves in a bad place that causes us pain and makes us unhappy. All too often our reaction to this is to bunker down and build walls to protect ourselves. But all we are really doing is reinforcing ourselves in the bad place, further entrenching ourselves and making it that much harder for anyone else to reach us.

When we find ourselves in a place we do not want to be, we should instead use that same effort to built bridges instead. Something that will take us somewhere else. It can be a bridge to be with people you know care about you, a bridge so someone else can reach you if you don’t have the strength to leave the bad place on your own yet, or just a bridge to somewhere different. You don’t know what that journey of the bridge will bring, but you know for sure that whatever it might be has got to be better than sitting behind a big wall with only the bad place that you know surrounding you.