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Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle

…we will have to do something quite extraordinary: We will have to go to great lengths. We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.

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Damn straight.

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A while back I heard my friend (male) insult another dude by saying, “You look like the kind of guy who wouldn’t go to Wal-Mart to buy his girlfriend a box of tampons” and I still think about that crowning insult sometimes

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The greeting of peace (as-salamu ‘alaykum) has many meanings. One of these meanings is that the person you are greeting will be safe from you (from your tongue, your heart, and your hand) and that you will not transgress against that person with your words or your deeds. This greeting is also a prayer (for the person you are greeting) for peace, safety, mercy, and blessings. We should take these noble meanings, which we so often say with our tongues, and make them our way of life in our dealings with other people.

Salman al-Ouda

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People will love you, people will hate you, and none of it will have anything to do with you.

Abraham Hicks

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Dil ka acha hona khaak k barabar, agar rishtay hi nibhanay na aatay hon.

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FUCK EVERYTHING.

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to persevere. to push through when you have to push through. you cannot change what happened but you can change how you relate to it.

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“It is gorgeous to live and forget. And to feel quite new.”

— D.H. Lawrence, from The Selected Poem of D.H. Lawrence; “Spring Morning,”

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خاموشی ہی بہتر ہے

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Me on my wedding day: you still like me right

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Since once in a blue moon I actually discover a decent rule for adulting, and since I know I have followers a few years younger than me who are just entering the workforce, I want to tell you about a very important phrase. 

“I won’t be available.”

Imagine you’re at work and your boss asks you to come in on Saturday. Saturday is usually your day off–coming in Saturdays is not an obligation to keep your job. Maybe you were going to watch a movie with a friend, or maybe you were just going to lie in bed and eat ice cream for eight hours, but either way you really, really don’t want to give up your day off.

If you consider yourself a millennial you’ve probably been raised to believe you need to justify not being constantly at work. And if you’re a gen-Z kid you’re likely getting the same toxic messages that we did. So in a situation like that, you might be inclined to do one of three things:

Tell your boss you’d rather not give up your day off. Cave when they pressure you to come in anyway, since you’re not doing anything important.

Tell your boss you’d rather not give up your day off. Over-apologize and worry that you looked bad/unprofessional.

Lie and say you’ve got a doctor’s appointment or some other activity that feels like an adequate justification for not working.

The fact is, it doesn’t matter to your boss whether you’re having open heart surgery or watching anime in your underwear on Saturday. The only thing that affects them is the fact that you won’t be at work. So telling them why you won’t be at work only gives them reason to try and pressure you to come in anyway.

If you say “I won’t be available,” giving no further information, you’d be surprised how often that’s enough. Be polite and sympathetic in your tone, maybe even say “sorry, but I won’t be available.” But don’t make an excuse. If your boss is a professional individual, they’ll accept that as a ‘no’ and try to find someone else. 

But bosses aren’t always professional. Sometimes they’re whiny little tyrants. So, what if they pressure you further? The answer is–politely and sympathetically give them no further information.

“Are you sure you’re not available?” “Sorry, but yes.”

“Why won’t you be available?” “I have a prior commitment.” (Which you do, even if it’s only to yourself.)

“What’s your prior commitment?” “Sorry, but that’s kind of personal.”

“Can you reschedule it?” “I’m afraid not. Maybe someone else can come in?”

If you don’t give them anything to work with, they can’t pressure you into going beyond your obligations as an employee. And when they realize that, they’ll also realize they have to find someone else to come in and move on.

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I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter and to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.

Leo Rosten

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Be so focused on your growth that everyone else’s business is irrelevant

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We often waste an incredible amount of time wanting to be somewhere else, someone else. Our head-space gets clogged with compare, contrast, what if, why can’t, I should. But you’re never getting this time back. You can’t borrow tomorrow. Please don’t save the best for last. The best is all of you, here, where you are, brightly lit and painfully now, in this breath you’re leaving. Each second dies as it is born; every hello must say goodbye; all is fading in the collapsing hallway of a fragile hourglass, a grain at a time. You are here. The best is you, now.

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From the perfection of Allah’s ihsan is that He allows His slave to taste the bitterness of the break before the sweetness of the mend. So He does not break his believing slave, except to mend him. And He does not withhold from him, except to give him. And He does not test him (with hardship), except to cure him.

Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyyah

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I wanted to get away where I didn’t know anyone for a while.

Elizabeth Bishop, from a letter to Anny Baumann c. November 1950