35 things i've learned

 
  1. The ability both to be wrong while allowing praise to be irrelevant, takes a tremendous amount of deep breathing. It’s also the only option.

  2. If you aren't contradicting yourself constantly, you aren't taking enough action.

  3. Health care is missing the human component. I forgot about that. Then I attended a focus group meant to better understand the experiences of parents whose kids died of a heart defect. And I remembered.

  4. As difficult as it can be at times, gratitude is the quickest way to the life you want.

  5. People die. I learned this four and a half years ago when I buried one. I learn it more and more every day.

  6. People live, too.

  7. There is so much death that is preventable. The truth of this statement is enough to paralyze you in anger and sadness. Doing so is to let impulse win.

  8. Letting impulse win, is the quickest way to hinder real progress.

  9. What impacts another, impacts us directly.

  10. What comes from the earth, has a frequency so vibrant and alive, that becoming present with it will bring you to tears if you let it. From the plants themselves to the blood and sweat that runs through our body. We are alive. And yet, there’s emails to respond to and car insurance to be renewed.

  11. Freedom comes not from seeking distant places as a means of escaping from ourselves, but in finding peace sitting on the ground beneath our feet. Power lies in the space occupying us in this moment.

  12. The fashion industry is second to the oil industry, in it’s ability to fuck the earth and society over. It needs to be transcended and it can start with individual acts to not get sucked in.

  13. You can make a difference. Even as you are spending energy, believing you can’t. The energy will be spent either way. Spend it doing things differently.

  14. Dead babies are spoken into reality when relevant or not, because the women who buried them have to be able to breathe with ease in the coming hours. The need to do so is as primal as eating and sleeping and whatever you do to make sure your heart is beating the next morning.

  15. A calling is something that fills the hole in your chest that was created by life going differently than you planned. Being a good human is learning not to question other people’s callings.

  16. The things you seek to bring outside of you, the intertwined complexities of all the experiences that showed you pieces of yourself, they make up a second beating heart in your chest. One that keeps you alive and breathing just as much as the first.

  17. That second beating heart, will become the lens through which you view the world.

  18. In every decision we are making, we are creating a new world.

  19. There is a blue print for the new world, but it is not what we think. It is consciousness. It is our intuition. It is meditation and quieting the chaos. It is that few seconds that exists before you react the way you normally would.

  20. Not knowing can be better than knowing. But it can also be the reason we can't get out of bed.

  21. Camera's are the avenue to the thing. They are not the thing.

  22. Birth is the thing. Literally and metaphorically. Birth to a human, to a vision, to a way of doing or seeing things differently or more accurately than before.

  23. Our ability to let things be good is linked to our ability to receive.

  24. Freedom is found in being fiercely magnanimous.

  25. The traditional approach to business is the quickest way to become irrelevant.

  26. The traditional approach to business is a recipe for burn out.

  27. Google, "Don't be precious about shit" and apply it to everything.

  28. The simplest and most uninteresting things can simultaneously be the most awe striking, heartbreaking, and ground crushing. We decide which.

  29. Art is deciding which.

  30. It's not appropriate to keep physical remnants of our loved one's bodies after they die (their organ's).

  31. I wish it were.

  32. I wish I had sat longer in the disturbing image of my son's decaying body. It would have made the unknown have less weight, now.

  33. Choosing to be appropriate over choosing to be honest, will reveal itself in negative ways later. Save yourself the trouble.

  34. The truest thing is needed to be spoken into existence, before healing is possible.

  35. Healing is always possible.