Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull

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 Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:

   In me behold the only skull

From which, unlike a living head,

   Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I quaff'd, like thee:

   I died: let earth my bones resign;

Fill up—thou canst not injure me;

   The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape,

   Than nurse the earth-worm's slimy brood;

And circle in the goblet's shape

   The drink of Gods, than reptiles' food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,

   In aid of others' let me shine;

And when, alas! our brains are gone,

   What nobler substitute than wine?

Quaff while thou canst—another race,

   When thou and thine like me are sped,

May rescue thee from earth's embrace,

   And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not? since through life's little day

   Our heads such sad effects produce;

Redeem'd from worms and wasting clay,

   This chance is theirs, to be of use.

Lord George Gordon Byron

People Who Go Quiet When They’re Hurt

 

Pexel 

They Call It Coldness. 

Psychology Tells a Different Story

You know that person who goes completely quiet when something hurts them? 

The one who says, “I’m fine.” and actually means, “Leave me alone.” 

Yeah, that person isn’t being cold and they’re not broken either. 

In fact, there’s a lot more going on beneath that silence than most people realize. 

If you’re someone who shuts down instead of speaking up, welcome. You’re about to feel very seen because today we’re getting into the psychology of people who go quiet when they’re hurt. The one society calls closed off, but science calls something else entirely.

Here’s what nobody has ever told you. 

That silence isn’t a flaw. It isn’t emotional immaturity. 

According to psychology, what your brain does when you’re hurting is one of the most complex emotional responses a human nervous system can produce. And the fact that nobody ever explained it to you doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It’s quite the opposite. Most people simply don’t have the language for it yet.

When Silence Isn’t a Choice

Let’s start with the thing everyone gets completely wrong about you.

When you go quiet, people assume you made a decision. Like you sat down, weighed your options, and thought, “I’ll just shut them out.” Like it’s calculated. Like it’s a power move. 

But that’s not what’s happening inside you at all, is it? 

When you get hurt, something in your body shifts. It’s not dramatic. It’s almost like a quiet closing. Words become harder to reach. Your chest gets heavy. And the idea of opening your mouth and trying to explain something you haven’t even fully processed yourself feels genuinely impossible.

That’s not you being difficult. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. There’s a researcher named Dr. Peter Levine who has spent decades studying what stress actually does to the body. 

And what he found is that the freeze response is just as hardwired as fight or flight.  

It’s not weakness and it’s not avoidance either. 

When emotional pain feels too big to process in real time, your brain pulls the emergency break. It slows everything down to protect you.

And here’s something that blew my mind when I first came across it. 

There’s a region in your brain responsible for producing language. And researchers have found that it actually goes quieter during emotional flooding. 

So when someone is standing in front of you saying, “Just talk to me. Just tell me what’s wrong.” 

And you’re standing there with nothing coming out, that’s not stubbornness. 

Your brain has literally made words harder to access because it’s doing something more urgent, keeping you together.

You’re not shutting people out. You’re holding yourself in. 

And there’s a massive difference.

Where Did You Learn to Go Quiet?

But here’s where it gets even more interesting because this didn’t start recently. 

You weren’t born like this. No one is. Babies scream. Toddlers cry on the floor in the middle of a grocery store without a single thought about whether it’s appropriate. Kids express pain loudly and openly and without apology until something teaches them not to.

At some point, something taught you that expressing your hurt out loud wasn’t safe. 

1. Maybe it was a home where emotions were treated like inconveniences, where you cried, and got told to stop being so sensitive. 
2. Maybe you opened up to someone you trusted completely and they minimized it, laughed at it, used it against you later. 
3. Maybe you expressed that you were hurting and instead of being held, you got lectured or ignored or made to feel like your pain was somehow the problem.

So, you did the logical thing and adapted. You got quiet, not because you stopped feeling, but because feeling out loud kept costing you something.

There’s a psychologist named John Bowlby who basically built his entire career around one idea that the way we learn to handle emotional pain comes directly from our earliest close relationships.

And what he kept finding over and over was that when those early relationships teach us that being vulnerable leads to more pain, our nervous system doesn’t forget that. It files it away. And it pulls that lesson out every single time something hurts.

Even decades later, even with completely different people, your silence is not a character flaw. 

It’s a survival skill your younger self built to protect you. And it worked. It got you here.

The Mind Behind the Silence

And now here’s the part that might genuinely surprise you. 

Because while everyone else sees stillness, your brain is anything but still. 

While the conversation is escalating and emotions are flying everywhere around you, you’re doing something completely different. You’re processing deeply, rapidly, and with a level of thoroughness that most people never apply to their emotional lives.

Researchers actually looked at what happens in the brains of people who go quiet under stress. 

And what they found is that the regions tied to self-reflection, memory, and thinking through future outcomes are significantly more active than average people. Your quiet might actually be one of the most mentally busy states a person can be in.

What’s actually happening inside that silence sounds something like this: 

• Did I contribute to this? 
• Have I felt this before? 
• What is this actually about? 
• What do I want to happen next? 
• If I say something right now, will it come out right or will it make everything worse?

You’re not avoiding the problem. You’re stress testing every angle of it before you say a single word. Because for you, speaking before you truly understand what you feel carries real risk, so you wait until you have something worth saying.

Most people see still water and assume nothing is happening beneath the surface. 

But you know better than anyone that still water runs deep.

When Silence Protects the People You Love

Now, here’s something about you that almost nobody recognizes. And honestly, it says a lot about who you are. Part of your silence is protecting the people you love. If you’re really honest with yourself, you already know this is true.

You go quiet partly because you know yourself. You know what lives at the bottom of that silence when the pain is fresh. And you know that if you open your mouth before you’ve processed it, what comes out won’t be a conversation. It’ll be something that can’t be taken back. So, you hold it. You wait. Not to punish anyone, but because you care enough about the relationship to not blow it apart in a moment of unfiltered pain.

There’s a concept in psychology called the window of tolerance. 

It’s basically the emotional sweet spot where real communication is actually possible. When you’re outside that window, flooded, raw, too deep in it, no real conversation can happen. 

No one can hear anything clearly and nothing productive gets said.

You already knew this intuitively, even if nobody ever gave it a name. That’s why you wait. Your silence, as uncomfortable as it makes other people, is often the most protective thing you know how to do. You’re not avoiding the conversation. You’re waiting until you’re actually capable of having it. There’s a real difference between those two things, even if nobody around you can see it.

What You Actually Need

But here’s the painful irony, and this one stings a little. 

The one thing that would help you open up is almost always the opposite of what you get. 

People push. They follow you from room to room. 

They say, “You can’t just shut me out.” Or, “This is so unfair. Just talk to me.” 

And every single time that happens, it confirms the very thing you’ve always quietly believed. 

That your way of processing isn’t valid. That your emotions are only acceptable if they’re immediate, verbal, and available on everyone else’s timeline.

What you actually need is the hardest thing to ask for. 

Patience without pressure. 

Someone who can sit in the discomfort of your silence and trust that you’ll come back. 

Someone who doesn’t make your stillness about themselves.

And research actually backs this up. 

When people who process emotions inwardly feel zero pressure to perform their feelings on someone else’s schedule, they open up so much more. 

Not because they were forced to, because for the first time it actually felt safe enough to.

You’re not asking people to read your mind. 

You’re asking them to trust you, to believe that the silence is not abandonment, that it’s just how you find your way back. And the people who are actually meant to be in your life will learn that.

When the Words Finally Come

And here’s the thing that’s really worth sitting with. 

The thing that doesn’t get said nearly enough, because you don’t speak until you’re truly ready. 

When the words finally come, they mean everything. You’ve turned them over a hundred times before they leave your mouth. You’ve checked them for accuracy, for fairness, for truth.

You don’t say things you don’t mean. 

You don’t weaponize your emotions to win an argument. 

You don’t throw out accusations in the heat of the moment just to watch them land. 

When you finally tell someone how you feel, it’s not a reaction. It’s a conclusion.

And that is genuinely rare. In a world where people say everything immediately and mean maybe half of it, you say less and mean all of it.

The people in your life who have been patient enough to wait for you to speak know this about you. They know that when you say something matters, it actually matters. There’s no performance, no noise, just the truth you took your time to find.

That’s not emotional unavailability. 

That’s emotional integrity. 

And there’s a difference.

 

Your Silence Is Not Who You Are

And when you put all of this together, something really important becomes clear. 

You go quiet when you’re hurt because your nervous system is protecting you. 

Because you learned early that vulnerability had a price. 

Because your brain processes pain with a depth and a thoroughness that most people never reach. 

And because part of you is always quietly trying to protect the people you love, even from yourself.

You are not cold. You are not manipulative. 

You are not broken or difficult or too much or somehow not enough. 

You are someone who feels things deeply and completely and takes the time to understand them before speaking.

And in a world that rewards whoever reacts the fastest and the loudest, that quiet, careful, considered way of moving through pain will never stop being misunderstood by the wrong people.

But the right people, they’ll learn to sit in your silence without fear. They’ll learn that your stillness is not distance. It’s presence. The deepest, most considered kind.

And one day, maybe not today, maybe not soon, you’ll find it a little easier to let someone in before you figured everything out. Not because the silence was wrong, but because you finally feel safe enough to not need it quite so much.

That’s not a flaw you’re fixing. 

That’s healing. 

And honestly, the fact that you’re here trying to understand yourself better means it’s already happening.

VALENTINA

My Inner Life

iantfoto/Gettyimages

 'Tis true my garments threadbare are,

          And sorry poor I seem;

But inly I am richer far

          Than any poet's dream.

For I've a hidden life no one

          Can ever hope to see;

A sacred sanctuary none

          May share with me.

         

Aloof I stand from out the strife,

          Within my heart a song;

By virtue of my inner life

          I to myself belong.

Against man-ruling I rebel,

          Yet do not fear defeat,

For to my secret citadel

          I may retreat.

Oh you who have an inner life

          Beyond this dismal day

With wars and evil rumours rife,

          Go blessedly your way.

Your refuge hold inviolate;

          Unto yourself be true,

And shield serene from sordid fate

          The Real You.

            

              

                

Robert William Service                  

Each Life, Its Own Mountain and River

 

StockCake

On the quiet dignity 

of different paths

I don’t know how heavy the rain you’ve walked through, so I have no right to question why your clothes are soaked.

I don’t know who you’ve loved, so I cannot judge why you’ve become so guarded toward love.

I haven’t seen the muddy roads you’ve trudged, so I won’t criticize the cautious steadiness of your steps.

I haven’t endured the long, lonely nights you’ve survived, so I cannot mock your preference for silence and solitude.

Every life is its own vast mountain and sea. We are born into different fires, raised under different skies. The storms we’ve witnessed vary, and the warmth and cold we carry in our hearts are never the same.

Some are surrounded by flowers from birth — gentle and open, never knowing the bite of frost. Others grow up dancing with the wind and rain — learning to hold their own umbrella, quietly hiding their scars.

In this world, no two lives perfectly align. Between people lie gaps of experience, circumstance, and perspective. You don’t understand my helplessness, and I don’t understand your ease. You haven’t known my wanderings and hardships, and I haven’t known your calm and grace.

We too often measure others by our own ruler, judging their choices through the lens of our own fortune. Yet behind every seemingly stubborn persistence, every apparent cowardice, every distant silence, there are untold stories and unavoidable burdens.

There is no need to sneer at another’s humility, to criticize their decisions, or to demand they live in the shape we prefer. Blooming has its brilliance; wilderness has its own quiet peace. Passion is one way to live — stillness is another worthy path.

True gentleness is knowing how uneven the world is, yet choosing to remain open-hearted. It is understanding that everyone carries their own suffering, and therefore refusing to judge lightly.

The best way to walk alongside one another is not to demand identical views or matching steps, but to acknowledge our differences and offer mutual respect.

You have your flower-strewn path. I have my thorny trail.

We need not look up to each other, nor look down.

We simply walk our own journeys and allow the other to do the same.

With kindness in our words, clarity in our sight, acceptance of all differences, and compassion for every circumstance — this is the finest practice for the rest of our lives.

 Neo Shakya

By The Fireside : The Builders

StockCake
 

All are architects of Fate,

  Working in these walls of Time;

Some with massive deeds and great,

  Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;

  Each thing in its place is best;

And what seems but idle show

  Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,

  Time is with materials filled;

Our to-days and yesterdays

  Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;

  Leave no yawning gaps between;

Think not, because no man sees,

  Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,

  Builders wrought with greatest care

Each minute and unseen part;

  For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,

  Both the unseen and the seen;

Make the house, where Gods may dwell,

  Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,

  Standing in these walls of Time,

Broken stairways, where the feet

  Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,

  With a firm and ample base;

And ascending and secure

  Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain

  To those turrets, where the eye

Sees the world as one vast plain,

  And one boundless reach of sky.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Are the People Who Help You Really Your True Friends?

Bruno Aguirre
 

Help is borrowed very easily, but 

it is always repaid with interest.

“Great obligations 

do not make a man 

grateful, but vengeful.” 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

in, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

• Have you ever thought about why, when people are not helping you in any way whatsoever during your bad times, your truest friend helps you? 

• Or that you are the defeated one, and your own friend who cares for you wishes for your victory?

• Or does he quietly rejoice at seeing you crushed beneath his feet, thinking to himself that only he in this world can help you?

• Perhaps one weak person feels a little more powerful next to another weak person?

• Does it really happen that people care for a defeated or weakened person, or that they hold pity for him?

• Have you ever tried to think about why your friend is helping you in your bad times? 

If it has happened with you that a friend helped you at a time when you were completely finished, when you did not have the courage to rise, as though a drowning man had found the support of a straw, and you came out of that heavy problem…

In such a situation you will become the lifelong slave of that friend, and he knows this, but he will not say it till his dying breath; yet you will never become conscious of your slavery. 

This is the final condition of help received in a bad time.

Now you can also use this as power, and perhaps you may also be betrayed. 

What if the person you help turns out to be an opportunist, or what if that person turns out to be a turncoat? 

Traitors can have many names; there is no point stretching this out.

Now you have to determine whether you need help, or whether you want to become the one who helps.

If you need help, then from whom and on what terms; 

and if you are to help, then whom and on what terms.

1. Who is your true friend, the one who stands with you in every adverse circumstance? 
2. But when no one is standing with you in your adversity, why is your true friend standing with you?
3. Perhaps to show that he is your well-wisher and that he holds good wishes for you?

Or, while helping you, does he want to tell you that you are weak and that only he can help you, and that he is more powerful than you, and at every moment you will keep feeling that apart from him you have no one at all in this world.

When you take someone’s support, you yourself indirectly grant that supporting person the status of an authorized individual, by which that person becomes a direct participant in the decisions connected to your life. And in this state you introduce him to everyone as a member of your family.

None of this says that taking a person’s cooperation is not right. 

Understand only this much: 

Whoever you take help from, it should not be used as a force or a pressure in your life, whether it be your financial decisions, or your familial ones, or any personal decision.

You must always remain free, because slaves follow orders, and they spend their lives dependent on the scraps of others.

Take help from someone only with the thought of help in return for help. 

But when you think this way, the person from whom you are taking help also knows that you will be of use to him, and then the power of both persons operates equally. Because when you think that you too will consider it proper to help in return for help, you do not carry a weak personality; your time may be weak, but you yourself hold a generosity toward assisting a weak person, and then you will experience that you yourself are a mass of power.

But if you feel that in your sorrow only your friend can support you, or that he wants to, then you are wrong, because help is a price that is borrowed very easily but has to be repaid with interest.

And the person who cannot repay it is discarded, called a traitor or an opportunist.

Is your friend, whom you are calling true, actually true, or is he merely running an act of being a true friend?

There is no definition of a true friend at all, because you call a true friend only the one who stands ready to have his backside beaten red alongside you; in return, you too hand over your backside to him like a gift box, and you also grant him the right that, like magic, whenever he opens that box, your backside is ready to be reddened. No fixed period of time is required for this; it is measured by the definition of the help: the bigger the help you have accepted, the longer, and for whatever problem, he can put your backside to use.

Your true friend may be social, he may be strong in his financial position, he may be familial, or he may even be a criminal, but when you are asking him for help, you should be aware of which principles your value is behaving in accordance with.

1. Is it merely accepting slavery in exchange for help, or will it turn into a harsh punishment, or will you be called a traitor? 
2. Can you return his help? 

• If yes, then you will easily be able to carry a humble and mature friendship that will remain alive for a long time. 
• If not, then like dogs you will only be called loyal, which will serve merely to improve their personal social image; and if someone says something against them, you will bite that person in the gathering and prove your true loyalty.

The above friendship is forgotten after proper use; after that, the person need not keep any relation with your loyalty, because he has kept many other dogs. And when such pet dogs confront other loyalists, a claim has to be staked there to being the truest loyalist. 

This seems difficult for those people who must give help in return for help but cannot give big help, and whose own condition cannot hold together without taking help, and such people are very soon kicked out of the gatherings.

Contradiction is also necessary in true friendship: the demand of time in exchange for time, the demand of money in exchange for money, or else you have to give or fulfil other help of the same value. 

Friendship is neither only continuous taking nor only continuous giving; it is arranged in the form of ice, which can change the form of its help when the need arises. 

In true friendship there is no expectation, yet without expectation true friendship cannot be sustained either.

If you befriend a snake, you will be bitten sooner or later; and if you befriend a monkey, you will surely be robbed. 

You will have to determine which option you choose and how painful your friendship turns out to be. 

That betrayal will happen is certain; how prepared you are is what needs to be known. 

Calling someone a true friend with your eyes closed, and calling someone a true friend even with your eyes open, is just like calling a tomato a fruit or a vegetable. 

Because there is no true friend at all in this world; a true friend exists in the form of some kind of price, which you will have to pay sooner or later. Whether you give him your time, or repay the debt of your friendship with money, or present the proof of your might by helping a troubled friend through some piece of information.

Now if someone tells you that God is the true friend, then even there you will find many people as helpless as those filing a petition before God for the resolution of a problem. 

Now, some people’s work gets done and some people’s does not; those whose spoiled work is set right attach themselves forever to that religion, that god, that sect, that monastery. And they throw themselves for all time into the propagation of that god.

But those whose work does not get done search for the path of another god, because only those people come to God whose work has gone terribly wrong and whose true friends of the human race cannot repair it. 

The problems over which a particular individual has no control are left at the door of faith; and when the work gets done, the only repayment is propagation. The meaning of saying this is that you will certainly have to repay something in return for help, even if God asks nothing of you.

There you will not consider it proper to be called a traitor, because at the door of faith no one will call you a traitor; but in order to escape a fear, the fear of self-reproach, you go on repaying the debt of your help very happily.

The final essence of the above article is this: 

Whoever your friendship is with, it is selfish, even if you have no awareness of it. 

But it is a mental acceptance of certainly giving in order to get something. 

A true friend truly does not exist at all; 

it is an exchange of time. It is a display of your own might; it is a false high in the weak companion’s mind that a friend is with him. Everything is as clear as water. A true friend and true friendship are an impossible coincidence, and this true friendship is only a loan taken before receiving something.

If you stand, stand together; otherwise you will be called a traitor and a selfish man.

“Are you a slave? 

Then you cannot be a friend. 

Are you a tyrant? 

Then you cannot have friends.” 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

in, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

in, Nietzsche Wisdoms

 

Sometimes

Valeriia Miller

Sometimes I can’t find the words

That fill my messy head.

Can’t find the effort to smile

Or get out of my silly old bed.

The world just sometimes feels like

I don’t fit and don’t belong,

And even when I make the effort,

A smile just doesn’t last long.

I could pretend with all my might

That I am the happiest I can be.

Surrounded by the world, it seems

Lonelier I couldn’t be.

Not sure what may be the answer.

Not sure if I’m really keen

To spend another day here,

Living this dreadful dream.

But I must find some courage,

Light a fire inside my heart

And find a love for life again,

And I know where I shall start.

I’ll walk among the forest

And feel the crisp sea breeze

And lay among the meadow

And listen to all the bees.

I’ll figure out the mayhem

And gaze at all the stars

And dance at every sunset

With a smile inside my heart.

Lucy Petersen

 

We Do Not Become Better by Finding Someone Worse

Drew Hays

 Be careful 

what another person’s failure 

brings out in you

You say you care about character, but character is revealed most clearly in how you treat people whose choices you do not understand.

It is easy to respect the respectable. 

Patience comes naturally with people who agree with us, live in ways we understand, and make mistakes we know how to forgive. 

The harder test comes when someone disappoints us, embarrasses themselves, behaves foolishly, or becomes someone we find difficult to respect.

We are remarkably good at noticing faults from the outside. Another person’s hypocrisy is obvious to us. Their selfishness, weakness, poor judgment, or lack of discipline can seem almost impossible to miss. Our own failures arrive with context. We remember what led up to them, what we intended, what pressures we were under, and all the other moments that prove we are more than our worst decision.

We rarely know another person with the same depth.

That difference should make us a little more careful.

Most of us carry things we would rather not have used as the final verdict on our character. 

We have regrets, private weaknesses, moments we handled badly, and decisions that make more sense to us now because we know the person who made them. Yet it is easy to deny that same complexity to someone else and reduce them to whatever they did most recently or most publicly.

Sometimes that is dressed up as accountability. 

Sometimes accountability is exactly what is required. 

But there are moments when the satisfaction we take in another person’s failure should make us suspicious of our own motives.

The Stoics repeatedly returned judgment inward for this reason. 

Before asking what is wrong with another person, it is worth examining what their failure is bringing out in us. 

• Why are we so eager to condemn them? 
• Why can their mistake feel satisfying? 
• Are we trying to understand what went wrong, or using their failure to reassure ourselves about who we are?

We do not become better by finding someone worse.

If someone behaves badly, there are now two questions in front of you. 

1. What did they do? 
2. What are you going to become in response to it?

The first belongs largely to them. 

The second is yours.

That distinction matters because another person’s failure can very easily become permission for our own. 

• Someone lies to us, so bitterness begins to feel justified. 
• Someone behaves arrogantly, and contempt starts to feel like clarity. 
• Someone loses control of themselves, and suddenly we feel entitled to lose control of ourselves in return.

Their behavior explains the situation. 

It does not decide our character.

Kindness does not require us to ignore what someone has done. Some actions deserve criticism. Some people need to face consequences. There are times when a relationship should end or a boundary should become firm.

The harder question is what we are trying to accomplish once we have decided that someone was wrong.

Correction has a purpose. So do consequences. 

Humiliation often serves the part of us that wants the other person to feel smaller because of what they did.

That is worth watching in ourselves, because anger can begin with a legitimate grievance and quietly change the goal. We stop asking what the situation requires and start asking what the person deserves to feel.

Hypocrisy makes this especially tempting. 

• A leader may preach principles they fail to live by. 
• A community can speak endlessly about virtue while behaving badly. 
• Someone can quote philosophy beautifully and still act without wisdom when it matters.

Their failure tells us something about them. 

It tells us very little about whether the principle itself is true.

A philosophy is not disproved by the hypocrisy of the person quoting it.

If someone who praises honesty lies, honesty has not become less valuable. 

If someone who speaks about self-control loses their temper, self-control has not failed. 

What failed was the person’s ability to live according to something they claimed to believe.

Our concern is what happens next.

The Stoics were deeply interested in that moment. 

Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminded himself to look at the judgment behind another person’s behavior before allowing anger or contempt to determine his response. 

In one passage he writes:

“When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it.” 

 

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.26

That question does not excuse the injury. 

It asks us to understand before we decide how to respond.

• Sometimes understanding will lead to patience. 
• Sometimes it will lead to a difficult conversation. 
• Sometimes a boundary needs to be drawn, a relationship needs to end, or someone needs to face the consequences of what they did.

Stoicism does not require us to make every response gentle. 

It requires us to keep the response under the direction of reason.

There is a difference between recognizing that someone behaved badly and needing to feel above them because of it. 

One can lead to correction. 

The other often tells us more about our ego than their mistake.

Perhaps that is the harder standard of character.

1. Can you see someone clearly without reducing them to what they did? 
2. Can you hold them responsible without needing their humiliation? 
3. Can you protect yourself without allowing resentment to decide who you become afterward?

We do not become better by finding someone worse.

Other people will continue to disappoint us. They will misunderstand things, make selfish choices, betray their own principles, and sometimes give us very good reasons to walk away.

What they do with their character remains theirs.

What happens to ours in response remains ours.

in, Stoic Wisdoms

On Growing Old

Tony Luciani

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying; 

My dog and I are old, too old for roving. 

Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying, 

Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving. 

I take the book and gather to the fire, 

Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute 

The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire, 

Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet. 

I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander 

Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys 

Ever again, nor share the battle yonder 

Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies. 

Only stay quiet while my mind remembers 

The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers. 

Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power, 

The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace, 

Summer of man its sunlight and its flower, 

Spring-time of man all April in a face. 

Only, as in the jostling in the Strand, 

Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud, 

The beggar with the saucer in his hand 

Asks only a penny from the passing crowd, 

So, from this glittering world with all its fashion, 

Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march, 

Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion, 

Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch. 

Give me but these, and, though the darkness close, 

Even the night will blossom as the rose. 

John Masefield

................................ insecurities about aging

 Ozgurdonmaz

the possibility of irrelevance

My mum, Pauline, having a conversation with me and Audrey, spoke with the wisdom of someone who was truly done with worrying about getting older.

First, she let us know that she herself had no plans of becoming invisible with age (to know my mum is to understand that such a thing would be impossible). She also reminded us that in certain cultures in the East, age is held with a kind of reverence, not embarrassment—where the accretion of years is something that garners respect. If you’ve reached a certain age, you know a thing or two, and should be listened to.

But there was one particular thing she said that hasn’t left my mind since. She recalled how her own mum passed around the age she is now (mid-60s, which she wouldn’t mind me telling you).

She expressed how lucky she feels to have every extra day her own mother never had. When she sees another wrinkle on her own face or body, my mum can’t help but be grateful for what that wrinkle represents: the fact that she’s still here.

This idea struck me precisely because it indicates the profound way in which our insecurities have us getting it totally backward. We lament the parenthetical lines appearing around our eyes, the hair that frustratingly seems to have better places to be than atop our head, the body that seems to be adding padding as though, unbeknownst to us, we are imminently moving to a colder climate where we will need it.

But what if each of these unwelcome additions or subtractions were simply a reminder of how lucky we are to still be at the party at all?

The writer Christopher Hitchens, in his days fighting terminal cancer, comically described what he believed most upset people about the predicament of dying:

“It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on—but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you.”

The real point for our purposes today is that if we haven’t been tapped on the shoulder and told we have to leave, shouldn’t that be the headline and not the bodily degradation that is stoking our insecurity?

In other words, we are very much still lucky enough to be at the party. Through this lens, even physical difficulties can be considered a reminder that we are still here. 

I’ve been around long enough to need a hip replacement? Hooray!

The next time you bemoan your aging looks, remind yourself how many people would have given anything to live long enough to have etched an extra few grooves on their forehead.

My mum’s framing around aging wasn’t a framing at all, but a deep sense of gratitude for her life. This gratitude I saw in her had a secondary effect. 

It revealed the superficial and limited nature of being afraid to age in the context of being less attractive to other people—the absurd subtext being: the whole point of living is to remain attractive to those we hope to date. That can’t be right, can it?

 

As I listened to my mum speaking, I watched in awe of this powerful woman, filled with a deep gratitude for life, not clinging to anything—certainly not an earlier version of herself, nor the attraction of those she once would have been attractive to. That couldn’t have mattered less. Her mind was on the trees she had seen that morning on our walk along the beach, the breeze she was enjoying, the fact that she had the opportunity at all to be in this majestic place that, as she acknowledged, “so many people will never get to see in their entire lifetime.”

She had captured a fundamental truth: that the point of getting older was not to obsess to an unhealthy degree about remaining attractive, but to become ever more grateful for the years one was given, and to put that gratitude to work in the living one does.

As I watched my mum moving through these days, I saw the exquisite presence with which she approached everything. I saw an enchanted child, in the vessel of a wise, mature woman, and it struck me that this is the form of staying young we should all aspire to.

Far from a regression, it is a recapturing of wonder. 

To say childlike wonder would be to do it a disservice. When a child looks up at a bird, or a tree, they may experience awe, but not the deep gratitude my mum was feeling. And yet, through that fusion of increasing awe and gratitude, a powerful new iteration of my mother was born.

I don’t need to tell you how attractive that makes her; you already know. But that’s not the point. 

When the wonder of the world becomes more and more visible to you, there’s no time to waste caring about who you’ve become invisible to.

Matthew Hussey