Forgiveness is not a matter of exonerating people who have hurt you. They may not deserve exoneration. Forgiveness means cleansing your soul of the bitterness of ‘what might have been,’ ‘what should have been,’ and ‘what didn’t have to happen.’ Someone has defined...
Here's what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact. Acknowledgement is...
It happens to all of us, I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And...
Joy: the kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.
You can be shattered and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece. But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong--but you...
Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
Ten times a day something happens to me like this--some strengthening throb of amazement--some good swing empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be...
[Re: 2020 Covid-19 pandemic] This is not lost time in which nothing happens. This is the time of your life and you need to live it fully each day. If we take each day as an opportunity for growth, we’ll always remember this time and the values we learned during this...