“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
–Carl Jung
Quote of the Week
A Letter to My Teenage Self on High School Graduation
Congratulations on making it through high school! I know there was never any real doubt that you would graduate, but you should celebrate anyway. No, you aren’t as emotional as many of the other girls, who are crying about leaving their best friends, singing Vitamin C’s graduation song, and talking about how life will never be the same again. You’re ready to move on to bigger and better things. But someday, even though you’d never want to relive it, you’ll be a little nostalgic about your high school experience. So you should go to the graduation parties, have fun at senior beach week, and try to appreciate this moment — because it’s true, your life never will be the same again.
Don’t Let Your Personal Brand Hold You Back
By the time we reach our mid- to late- twenties, most of us have adopted labels for ourselves. We’ve come up with short ways to describe ourselves to someone we’ve just met. We’ve developed our personal brands. We’ve crafted elevator pitches and written social media introductions and online dating profiles. We tend to use nouns for this purpose: I’m a writer, a dog-lover, a runner, an ENTP, an introvert, an empath. These descriptions help us to order our lives and to feel a sense of solid identity.
The problem with such labels is that they can make it very difficult to change. Our interests and personalities are not static. To some extent, our identities are fluid — or they should be, if we have any hope of adapting to life’s unexpected events.
Quote of the Week
“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”
Dolly Parton
Illustration print available from littlethingsstudio on Etsy
Reflections on Time and Impermanence
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” -Confucius
My second life began when I was twenty-six. I at once became keenly aware of how short life is, how it can end suddenly, how none of us is promised tomorrow. This realization was not triggered by a near-death experience or the loss of someone close to me. It came about in the aftermath of divorce, while struggling to build a life for myself and to sculpt an identity. It arose during months of counseling sessions, self-reflection, trying to lift myself out of the hole of depression. I read the words of Eckhart Tolle, echoing the sentiments of the Buddha and other wise people over the millennia: “the present moment is all you have.”