Youthful Life: X

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”  Lois Lowry Lois Lowry's "The Giver" is my favorite book of all time, and whenever I have lost touch with the people of the world I reread it to remind of how people, their stories, and sharing them is what makes life vibrant. There are people in my life who have just been there but I have never taken the time to figure out how they got there. Someone being proximate to me should mean that I take the time, make the effort, and create the space to strive to understand them. People must be more than their utility to me. If I truly believe people are inherently invaluable, why then have I long treated those around me as static characters serving me in my life story instead of dynamic character with their own stories. I have spent so much prioritizing me, my plots, and navigating the chapters of  my life that I have never quite paused to read the stori...

"In times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” Chadwick Boseman  I'm still processing through Black Panther  but even so there is so much to unpack from it. This week I've spent substantial time talking about authentic self-care, narrative autonomy, and emotional labor. What I have come to see is that so many of the people I've interacted with recently have yet to realize what makes them both mundane and unique. It's this balance of self-actualization that you are in fact the only person who is you, and also that you are like other people. That duality matters. We want to be different but we also don't want to feel alone in the world. We yearn for human connection and yet want to retain our individuality. What if we treated ourselves - that is who we are, how we are, our stories, our gifts/talents, etc. as if they were the most valuable thing in...

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." Barack Obama The start to a new year means inevitably the promising of resolutions that will most likely not be kept. The idea behind the tradition is noble but in practice rarely goes according to plan. Maybe it's because the declaration is arbitrary, or because its easier to fall into old habits than it is to make new ones. There's still merit to resolutions though but the most effective ones often are limited in their scope, or else involved a mindset shift. It's the difference between committing to a paradigm shift versus a one-off goal. One of mine this year is to be more mindful about my time and how I spent it. This is the year I reclaim my time. Time might be a social construct but it's one that guides the parameters of our realities and how we experience said reality. Where we spend in time is ...

Truth - Life is full of ambiguity. Things never happen the way that we imagine them to. As much as we try and plan it all out, life always does it's own thing. More often than not, things tend to work out for the better, or at least gravitate towards some semblance of relative normalcy. That randomness that we all dread and strive to avoid though can be inevitable. Sometimes we have to embrace the haphazard nature of life, and just go with it. Doesn't make it any easier venturing into the unknown. "There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met." William Butler Yeats   One of the most dubiously exhilarating, and simultaneously most terrifying things in life is moving to a new place. There's new people and places to discover. Things to do, food to try, and connections to be made - the possibilities are endless. At the same time, you're absolutely all alone, fear can be truly debilitating, and doubt can settle in. It's this con...

Truth - We live in a world of communication. To be human is to be in contact with other humans. That ease of communication ranges greatly though from one experience to another. Some people have access to resources, devices, and networks that make communicating nearly instantaneous. Others are limited in that respect. And yet somehow people convey what they need to across barriers of medium, language, ability, etc. Conversations go on around us all the time, and sometimes they don't. The dialogues we're part of all depend on the context we find ourselves in. How do we regulate our correspondence? " Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din:  the cocktail party from hell." Maureen Dowd I remember in high school , back in the days when we had limits on ...