Words of Wisdom: Quotes on Self & Becoming

"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
– Steve Jobs

Now that's definitely one to think about. Courage to follow your heart and intuition. I think that too often we ignore those things, for various reasons, and ignore what we truly wish to become. But then the question becomes, how do we find the courage to follow our heart and intuition? Definitely something to think on.

"Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is."
– Erich Fromm

I think this one basically explains itself. We fill our lives with "to do" lists and various tasks, but really, this is our main "to do".

"Just don't give up on trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong."
– Ella Fitzgerald

What a beautiful way to say don't give up on your dreams. Chase them, catch them, live them.

Words of Wisdom: Quotes on Accomplishment & Perserverence

I occasionally do posts around quotes. I get daily inspirational quotes in my email and like to save the ones that really speak to me. And let me tell you, I love quotes, so I tend to compile a lot of them. I've decided to be more consistent with posting them. I think I'm going to make Sundays my "Words of Wisdom" quote days. I hope you enjoy them.

"We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are."
– Tobias Wolff

Because without adversity and challenge, how else can we truly be challenged to discover our true depths? Humans have an amazing capacity to endure hardship and face overwhelming odds. Like it says, "we are made to persist". So don't make excuses. Just do it.

"Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same."
– Lois McMaster Bujold

There's one to kick my perfectionist butt. Just chew on that one for a while.

"When you get into a tight place and it seems that you can't go on, hold on — for that's just the place and the time that the tide will turn."
– Harriet Beecher Stowe

Everytime I read this quote I think of C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. It also reminds me of Lord of the Rings. "...the tide will turn" Sometimes we just have to hold on and wait for that change, that turn of the tide. Just don't let go.

Careful

I love my brother*. We haven't talked in a while, and this was part of our im conversation this afternoon:

me: did i tell you i'm riding quads now?
Ani: omg, isnt that dangerous
me: i'm very careful
i don't ride big
i've only fallen once
on our second trip out
Ani: "careful" from the same girl who trips up stairs?**


*Go check out my nicknames post if you aren't sure about who Ani is. ;)
**For the record, it's true. I have a scar on my knee from one such encounter. The circumstances are even funnier. (in hindsight...at the time I was mortified)

P.S. Sorry for the multiple posts in one day...but I couldn't pass up sharing this little gem. :)

Quotes on Change

Change is a big part of life. Some change is big, some is little. But it happens nonetheless. A few quotes piling up in my email seemed to agree with me.

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."
– Lao-Tzu

Such a simple thought at first glance, almost as if it's unnecessary to speak. But at second look, it speaks volumes. Evaluate your path, you can always change directions. Like it says, if you don't, you'll end up exactly where you're headed. Question is, where do you want to go, and are you on the road to getting there?

"When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge."
– Tuli Kupferberg

We as humans so often fall into patterns and habits. We sink into our comfort zones and sometimes never leave them. After all, our patterns and habits are so comfortable, we feel safe in the known, why should we leave it? But breaking patterns, unlearning habits, can yield such incredible outcomes that make us wonder why we wasted so much time stuck in the habit of the known. (wow, could I have used the word habit or pattern any more in one paragraph?)

"I have always believed that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value."
– Hermann Hesse

This quote pretty much defines my outlook on life. An outlook that, unfortunately, many people don't understand or appreciate. And I don't really care if people get it or not, I just let it roll off. I just smile and let them wonder why I'm always so happy.

Words of Wisdom-a post around quotes

I haven't done a quote post in a while, but I have a building list in an email draft that I save each time I get a daily quote email that really speaks to me. These ones really seem to fit my life.

"I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: Try to please everybody all the time."
– Herbert Bayard Swope

I think I'm guilty of this at times, especially lately. I need to remember that sometimes I need to take care of me first. I can't please everyone all the time, and quite honestly, I don't want to...can you imagine how exhausting that would be?

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
– Anna Quindlen

We as humans are not perfect, far from it in fact. But that's okay, that's part of the beauty of living. We can be perfect in our own ways and we do that by becoming ourselves. We make mistakes, it's how we learn. And on that note...

"Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience."
– Victoria Holt

What a wonderful sentiment that so many of us often forget. I know I'm guilty of that one. I recognize things as experience...but I think I regret too much sometimes. I think I'm going to adopt this sentiment to live life without regrets. What a great attitude to have about life. And to wrap up...

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
– Theodore Seuss Giesel

Everything can always come back to Dr. Seuss. This is one of my favorite sayings, one which I seem to frequently forget...you know, while I'm off trying to please everyone. Of course saying what you feel doesn't have to mean you say the first thing that pops into your head, there is always room for tact and diplomacy. But saying what you feel is important...you can't expect people to divine your inner thoughts. It's not fair to them and it will only frustrate or upset you.

After 2 a.m.

I keep trying to write...there are things going through my head...but all that seems to want to come out is "nothing good happens after 2 a.m." It's a quote from the episode of How I Met Your Mother that is on right now. It's not even close to 2 a.m. right now, but I feel like it might as well be I'm so tired.
Good news and bad news...I figured out that that emotional rollercoaster involving lots of tears the past two days...it's a side effect of the mono thing. Bad news? I figured it out when the dang thing activated and made me feel like I got hit by a train. This is round three on activation...it's going to take a crowbar to get me out of bed in the morning. But at least I know I'm not crazy, which is good, right?
Other good news, I'm going home this weekend! I'll write more later. I need to go to sleep now, I'm exhausted.

Three Life Quotes

Once again it is time for me to finally get around to doing something with the few quote emails I've starred for later evaluation and thought. These three are definitely interesting, and are ones that I've really enjoyed thinking about.

"It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be."
– Anatole France

Once upon a time I might not have given this quote a second thought, just read it and sent it to the archives. But given everything that's been going on in my life, it caught my attention and prompted at least 10 minutes of thoughtful reflection. It really is straightforward and doesn't seem to require explanation. I just really like it, and I tend to agree with it.

"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth."
– Benjamin Disraeli

This is a big thing for me, especially lately. Like a friend of mine once said, emotions are valid because you feel them. They may not be rational or make sense, but that doesn't make them invalid. Showing feeling is part of being human, and you should never have to apologize for feeling. Sometimes the manner of address may require apology, but never the emotion itself.

"Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule."
– Samuel Butler

Of course there is a quote involving music. I mean, it is me, after all. This quote pretty much encompasses how I think. Sure there are rules and guidelines, but I've never been one to live within constraints, not really. I'm not going to do something just because everyone else does it. I'm so stubborn that I might do the exact opposite! (sometimes, depending on the situation) This quote is basically self-explanatory, but it was definitely one that I really liked the morning it got sent to my inbox.

Wisdom from the Reader

• No do-overs. In four-square, there are no "do overs." The same is true of life. If you screw up, you rarely get a second chance. Accept this and move on. Instead of arguing or pleading for a second try, figure out what went wrong and try to fix it. No one respects the kid who constantly requests a do-over, so accept your mistakes and focus on improvement.


• When it's time to go home, find a partner to cross the street with. There's safety in numbers and two heads are better than one. When it's time to head in a new direction, find someone to help you. Whether that person is a family member, a spouse, a partner, a friend, or a dog, they can be your support system to get you through life's hazards. Can you do things on your own? Absolutely. Should you lean on this person? Not necessarily. But whether you need them or not, having a friend to hold your hand as you cross the street can make the trip a pleasure.

This was part of this article in my Google feed reader today. (I'm a little addicted to my reader) I just thought these were interesting thoughts for life and wanted to remember them. I started writing this at work, but just got distracted, so sorry for the lack of commentary. But I'm sure you can appreciate the thoughts without my incessant rambling about them ;)

Weekend in Brief

I haven't had a chance to transfer my photos from the weekend. There really aren't that many of them anyways, it was much too hot for picture taking, and the pictures I do have I'm pretty sure are all people pictures. So, today there is no picture. I'm terribly bored with the ones I have. Clearly I need to be taking more pictures, learning and trying new things. I thought about putting off my post till later, but then I got this quote in my email:

"If we wait for the moment when everything is ready, we shall never begin."
– Ivan Turgenev

...and thought better of it. Figured maybe someone was trying to tell me something about putting things off, waiting until I've got everything wrapped with a tidy bow on top. Life isn't tidy, it would be much too boring that way.
That being said, this weekend was WONDERFUL!!! We had a great time with my family...my brothers practically ignored me, they REALLY like the bf. He plays with them and is basically a human jungle gym, which they love. The baseball games were fun, even though they both lost, but good grief it was hot. It was about 101 when my mom left the first game to take my littlest brother home for a bit to cool off before his game started. I must've drank about 6 bottles of water it was so hot. There was plenty of water being dumped on heads, which is surprisingly refreshing. It helped quite a bit. We had planned to barbecue, but everyone was so hot and tired that we decided to go out for pizza instead.
The biggest excitement of the weekend, is that the bf is going to do some stuff around the house for my parents. Big deal, really exciting. I'm not even sure exactly how it came about, but the bf loves projects, and has decided to do a bunch for my parents. First things first, he's going to build a patio cover, which should help with the heat on the back of the house in the summer. We'll be going back up in a few weeks to do that. The next project is to close in the wall on one of the front rooms so that the door is the only access, redo the tiling on the fireplace and use the same for the front entryway and the kitchen, and put in laminate wood flooring. Perfect, remember? I am SO excited. My parents have wanted to do these things for a long time, but it's just so expensive! With the bf doing it (with some help from me and my best friend), they're really only paying for the materials, which gives it a much friendlier price tag. And bonus? I get to spend some more time with my family, which I know we'll all love. I've wanted to do these projects, but my mom didn't want me learning how to do these things on our house. (understandably so) The bf is really excited, I'm excited, my parents are excited. Overall it's just a great thing :) Haha, did I mention I have the best bf ever? Seriously. He makes me so happy, I literally cannot stop smiling!
So, those are the highlights of the brief visit home. I'm still struggling a bit with this whole writer's block thing. It comes and goes. It's annoying. But whatever, I'll get it figured out. And don't worry, there will be plenty of pictures when we get these projects started. :) I'm excited! I love redesign and this sort of work. :)
And hopefully I'll start feeling creative again soon. Ugh. But look at the shiny weather, it's lovely. :) Maybe I should go to the beach. I think we're going to Sea World tomorrow...maybe...

A Day of Quotes

Once again I find my inbox cluttered with daily quote emails that I've marked as wanting to remember, to write about. I'm finally getting around to putting them in here. Just little bits to think about, that I enjoyed when I got the initial email.

"Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments, but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures."
– Joseph Addison

This quote definitely makes you think. It's kind of a round-about way of saying "learn from your mistakes", or some message similar to that. Sometimes the best things are disguised as the not so best things, and sometimes it takes a while to see them. Everything happens for a reason, right? So if we wait it out and are patient, eventually we'll see why, see things in "their proper figures". Interesting thought, took me a couple times reading it to really agree, but once the true meaning hit me, I really liked the quote.

"It's not what you are, but what you don't become that hurts."
– Oscar Levant

It's absolutely true. It's the "what ifs" we never pursue that hurt us most, leave us with regrets. We should live life without regrets, but so often get scared of the what ifs and chicken out. It's the things we never do that we long for most. Even if you try something and it doesn't work out, it's much better to have tried and learned (as Joseph Addison so brilliantly pointed out) than it is to never have tried at all.

"Reading is important — read between the lines. Don't swallow everything."
– Gwendolyn Brooks

Now this one is quite a bit different from the other two quotes. I liked it because it has different meanings, depending on the level on which you interpret it. You have the basic level of actual, literal reading. Slightly more interpretive actual reading, but reading for content (kind of like don't believe everything you see on tv). But on a deeper level, you can apply it to situations and people. Don't accept (swallow) everything at face value. There are levels and layers, and what you see isn't always what you get. So question, be alert, read between the lines. If you swallow everything you're going to miss out on so much.

Maybe some women aren't meant to be tamed. Maybe they're supposed to run wild until they find someone just as wild to run with.

This final quote I actually saw on a Facebook "bumper sticker" yesterday, and really fell in love with it. It just seems to fit my personality. I mean, there have been guys before, but things never worked. They gave up too easily, they couldn't handle me. Not that I'm a handful or anything (not all the time anyways...) but I'm headstrong and independent, and take a certain amount of patience and "taming". But reading this, makes perfect sense. To "tame" someone like me, would be to change who I am, and that's something I simply won't do. I don't need taming, I need someone who appreciates me for me, who loves who and what I am, and doesn't want to change it. Rather, they want to encourage it and run alongside to keep up. And I think I've found that with the bf. It's wonderful. (haha, and you thought I'd get in a whole post without talking about the bf!.....really I tried though)

Today's photo is from the luncheon I went to with the bf's mom on Saturday. The tables were decorated with different themes, ours was 4th of July, the photo is of one of the table decorations. It was really a wonderful day, I really enjoy spending time with his mom, she's such a wonderful woman. She raised herself a fine man. :)

Photo stats:
~taken May 10, 2008
~settings: full auto, flash did not fire

Words of Wisdom

Somewhere in the not so distant past I signed up to get daily inspiration emails. I have a few sitting in my inbox, starred and waiting to be archived, but needing to be filed away somewhere because I really liked them.

"You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result."
– Mahatma Gandhi

I tend to overthink. Sometimes it can be helpful, but more frequently it results in inaction and some mild form of paralysis...or the alternative driving myself crazy thinking of too many possible scenarios, outcomes or actions. I like this quote because, well, I think it's true, and I often times forget that while thinking is important, (I highly recommend it to everyone I know...and even those I don't) there comes a point where you have to DO something, because like the quote says, if you do nothing, there will be no result. So do SOMETHING. You don't always have to be right 100% of the time. I mean come on, where's the fun in that? How boring would life be then? Ha, I say this now, but just stick around for when I do things wrong-I'm sure to be singing a different tune.

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity."
– Gilda Radner

This fits quite nicely with the one above. Take the moment and make the best of it. Think and think as much as you'd like, you can't control every minute variable so you can't predict with complete accuracy what is going to happen, but do something, and make the best of it. Life wouldn't be nearly so fun without some of the delicious ambiguity.

"When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure."
– Peter Marshall

I got this quote on a day when I was not my usual happy-go-lucky, optimistic self, and it was definitely a wake up call that so what? Adversity builds character, or something like that. It's like that old saying that God won't give you anything you can't handle. And while sometimes we may wonder what we've done to make God trust us so much, it always turns out right in the end, though "right" may be something completely different than expected. You have to endure the difficulties to make everything else worthwhile.

"The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence."
– Bruce Springsteen

This last quote fits nicely with my firm belief that you have to get older, but nobody said anything about growing up. Let me describe my personality in a few words: happy, optimistic, smiling. While there are absolutely more facets to me, those are the most obvious and most encompassing. I've had people over time question how I can possibly be so happy and positive so much of the time. In fact, I even have a friend who has taken to marking down on his calendar those rare days when I actually get upset about something. The one he has down so far was a ridiculously annoying and whiny customer who called me about 8 times (seriously, no joke), and by the 8th time of giving her the same responses and listening to her same whining and basically her being a spoiled brat who planned to hold her breath until she got her way (which, sidenote, was against our policies and we were not going to change them for a student who thinks she is the queen), I about went through the roof. I actually had to leave the office for about 10 minutes to get the irritation out of my system. But I digress. While many would argue, and I would mostly agree, that I am far more innocent than most of my peers, I am far from being entirely sheltered, and I still keep my idealism. It's like this innate trait that is just there. And I love it. There have been enough things that should have broken that idealism, and sure, it gets bruised every now and then, but I seem to heal and bounce back ridiculously quickly. I simply choose to see life in the glass half full view, rather than the opposite.
I read a post somewhere in the past few weeks in The Happiness Project about shielding your joyous ones. It made a lot of sense, and totally applied to my life. It's an interesting blog, Wednesdays are tip days, they're my favorites. :) Anyways, it was an interesting read, and I got a lot out of it. It basically verbalized things that I have thought and felt, but never really transferred to words, either written or spoken.

Now I realize that my pictures are not always relevant to the posts, but, oh well. My blog, my rules. I think I wrote before about how this was supposed to be a blog for my photos and I was going to have another one just to write in. Clearly I have a hard enough time keeping up with ONE blog, let alone more than one. So I merged the two ideas and decided just to use this one since I'd already started it, and just include a picture or two in each post. This picture is from our sushi-fest the first night my cousin was down to visit a few weeks ago. One of the rolls we ordered was something like the fire-fire roll, and it came with sugar burning in hollowed out cucumber. So bizarre, but really cool looking. It was a tasty roll. Well, the bf (just friends at the time) ate the salmon off the top of mine...can't do the salmon. I like it much better when my dad grills it during the summer, it's so tender and flaky. Absolutely delicious.

Photo specs:
~taken on March 28, 2008
~setting: auto, set to no flash