One of my all time favorite books on writing is Brenda Ueland’s “If You Want to Write. A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit”. It is an uplifting, witty, helpful and supportive book for writers. Written in 1938, it is still relevant today.
Below is what Brenda says about creating one another through listening, attention and words. Enjoy!
“Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force…
When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life…
When we listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other…
and it is this little creative fountain inside us that begins to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom…
Well, it is when people really listen to us, with quiet fascinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way.” -Brenda Ueland
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On a day when I am overwhelmed by the feeling of overwhelm and trying to relax the tight knot in my stomach, I stumble across Steth Godin’s new ebook: What Matters Now and find this entry:
EASE
We are the strivingest people who have ever lived. We are ambitious, time-starved, competitive, distracted. We move at full velocity, yet constantly fear we are not doing enough. Though we live longer than any humans before us, our lives feel shorter, restless, breathless…
Dear ones, EASE UP. Pump the brakes. Take a step back. Seriously. Take two steps back. Turn off all your electronics and surrender over all your aspirations and do absolutely nothing for a spell. I know, I know – we all need to save the world. But trust me: The world will still need saving tomorrow. In the meantime, you’re going to have a stroke soon (or cause a stroke in somebody else) if you don’t calm the hell down.
So go take a walk. Or don’t. Consider actually exhaling. Find a body of water and float. Hit a tennis ball against a wall. Tell your colleagues that you’re off meditating (people take meditation seriously, so you’ll be absolved from guilt) and then actually, secretly, nap.
My radical suggestion? Cease participation, if only for one day this year – if only to make sure that we don’t lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease.
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Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Her new book
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage will be
published in January, 2010.
Hope this little piece on ease lights up your day, it certainly brightened mine. If you want to download your own copy of What Matters Now, you can do so here.
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Photo Source: lepiaf.geo via Flickr under a Creative Commons License
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“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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… I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in every foreign language.
Don’t search right now for the answers, which could not be given you, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answers.” –Rainer Maria Rilke
If you are curious about finding some of your own life answers, take the ‘What Lights You Up Questionnaire’
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While I am working on a post about the mistakes women make in relationships, I came across this quote by Kathy Freston.
In her book “The ONE. Discovering the Secrets of Soul Mate Love” she writes:
Love can play itself out in so many scenarios (warm and excited conversations, great sex, screaming fights, tumultuous breakups, to name just a few), that it’s not always easy to see its underlying message.
I believe it is this: You are not successful in love just because you find a partner and stick with them for a lifetime; you are successful in love when it provides you with a way to keep learning about yourself and the world around you, becoming more connected with the Oneness of all of life, so that each experience you have - glorious, sad, or frustrating - becomes a strand in the web of your evolution. How you navigate the ins and outs of love is what gives purpose to your time on earth.”
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Related Posts:
5 Tips For Staying Happy in Your Relationship
Your Relationship Can Make You a Better Person: Here’s Why
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Do you want to find out what lights you up? Take our ‘What Lights You Up - Questionnaire’
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Photo Source: Tiago Ribeiro via Flickr under a Creative Commons Lisence
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