An estimated 20.8 million people in our country are living with a substance use disorder. This is similar to the number of people who have diabetes, and 1.5 times the number of people who have all cancers combined. This number does not include the millions of people who are misusing substances but may not yet have a full-fledged disorder. We don’t invest nearly the same amount of attention or resources in addressing substance use disorders that we do in addressing diabetes or cancer, despite the fact that a similar number of people are impacted. That has to change.
Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.
I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
(via
awakeinthedream)
In the end, always laugh. And do not lose this strange habit of having faith in life.
We are living in a time when men, impelled by mediocre and ferocious ideologies, have gotten into the habit of being ashamed of everything — ashamed of themselves, of being happy, of loving or creating.
Heroes didn’t leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn’t wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.
You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you.
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
