"How ironic, to realize that maturity brings not more conviction, but less. At twenty-two, I still believed I could make a life plan and then set about executing it; that there were answers to all my questions, and if I just worked hard enough, I would find them. What I feel now is both a greater sense of fragility, knowing that life is both unpredictable and finite, and at the same time, an awareness that, no matter how long I live, I'll never get things all figured out. Uncertainty is part of the human condition; perhaps contentment comes as we learn to get comfortable with it."
"Life, as I'm finally coming to see, isn't all onward and upward after all; it's also wide-open plateaus and shadowy thresholds, the lonely liminal spaces between what's ended and what has yet to begin. It is here that the darkness can feel most acute, our anxiety most intolerable. But perhaps it is also here, in the wild borderlands of our soul journeys, that we begin to trust our own inner compass to guide un onward. I wonder if I have the stamina to endure this silence, to allow what's next to reveal itself, rather than to grasp too quickly at some new thing just because it's there."
"Going away taught me something about what it means to stay."
1 comment:
These are such beautiful words. I do find less and less conviction and more of a quiet settling into myself. I think I need to read that book!
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