Category: đź’¬ Quotes
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Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
This idea (and reality) has been one of the most challenging to impart to my kids as I’ve tried to equip them for their post-high school, young adult lives. They seem to be anti-planning/scheduling.
It’s easy to feel isolated or prefer to be alone when you’re stressed. But connecting with others from time to time can help decrease your stress, even if you’re an introvert.
It’s during these times that it is best to act and make decisions based on what you know rather than what you feel. Not always easy though. Especially when you’re in the thick of it. I’m trying to be more mindful and intentional about this since I know my default is to withdraw and isolate.
Look back in memory and consider…how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!
Seneca, ‘On the Shortness of Life’
Our cultural attachment to our phones, she says, is paradoxically both destroying our ability to be bored, and preventing us from ever being truly entertained.
“We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom, because every time we get our phone out we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems,” Mann says, adding that people can become addicted to the constant dopamine hit of new and novel content that phones provide. “Our tolerance for boredom just changes completely, and we need more and more to stop being bored.”
A quote from Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. as well as the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good.
Although a relatively older article, I’m always looking for insights from credible sources that effectively back up what my kids have been hearing from me for years.
I watched just a snippet of an interview Kate Bowler did with Fr. Greg Boyle and he said something that I’ve found myself chewing on a bit this morning.
“I believe God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.”
It’s ironic—every time I share what I think is fatherly wisdom with one of my kids, I soon stumble upon a quote from someone far more accomplished that echoes the same thought. I end up sharing their words—not to validate my own, but because sometimes another voice resonates more than a parent’s.
I was reading the chapter on community building in The Second Mountain by David Brooks and then the following quote shows up in my Readwise daily review. It’s not intuitive to correlate these books but the idea of collective wisdom and the value of community over individualism is highlighted here.
