Life is A Beautiful Struggle

1. Never compare your love story with those in the movies, because they are written by scriptwriters. Yours is written by God. 

        

2. Love me without fear. Trust me without wondering. Love me without restrictions. Want me without demand. 

      

3. A relationship with God is the most important relationship you can have.

     

4. Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them- if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

           

5. Real beauty is being aware of yourself and honest about who you are. When you’re comfortable in your own skin, you look beautiful on the outside, regardless of how many flaws you have. My flaws? I break out. I have cellulite. But all of that is just being human.

         

6. If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can’t afford to be with them. It’s not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what the price is. You set it yourself, and if you’re lucky, it’s reasonable. You have a sense of when you’re about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, “Enough with this stuff. Stop making excuses. No one’s that busy at work. No one’s allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden.” But most people don’t get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you’ll figure out if it’s worth it later.

             

7. Sometimes, our lives can change so fast that the change outpaces our mind and hearts. It’s those times, I think, when our lives have altered but still long for the time before everything was altered-this is when we feel the greatest pain. I can tell you, though, from experience, you grow accustomed to it. You learn to live your new life, and you can’t imagine, or even really remember how things were before.

         

8. Hear with your heart, see with your soul, be guided by a hand that you cannot hold, trust even if you cannot see. That’s how faith must be. Sometimes the things we can’t change, end up changing us instead.

         

9. In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

         

10. I can’t say that I’m mad at you, because I’m not. I can’t say that I hate you, because I don’t. And I can’t say that I’m done or that I’ll never talk to you again, because I know that I’m not. And I know that I will. But I can say that I hope and I pray, that if you really care about me at all, like you claim that you do, that you will stop setting me up, that you will stop saying things that you know you don’t mean.

        

11. We have this idea that love is supposed to last forever. But love isn’t like that. It’s a free-flowing energy that comes and goes when it pleases. Sometimes, it stays for life; other times it stays for a second, a day, a month, or a year. So don’t fear love when it comes, simply because it makes you vulnerable. But don’t be surprised when it leaves either. Just be glad you had the opportunity to experience it.

            

12. Sometimes it’s better when things aren’t perfect. At least that way, you know it’s real.

        

13. Is it me? Am I the reason people always leave? Am I the reason all these things keep happening to me? Maybe I’m just destined to be alone.

            

14. Do not look at the world through your head; look at it through your heart.

          

15. To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.

        

16. Maybe my life hasn’t been so chaotic. It’s just the world that is and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

          

17. Americans know entertainment, they don’t know pleasure.

            

18. The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this: If you’re brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.

         

19. Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to any who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed- much closer than anything we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love.

        

20. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.