inkaseth

[inkaseth]

You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it's really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It's learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It's learning how to build a simple life you are proud of.

- Brianna West

[inkaseth]

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Keep the faith. Do the work.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

- Cheryl Strayed “Tiny Beautiful Things”

[inkaseth]

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[inkaseth]

Learned from scalding my tongue with hot coffee that some things cannot be rushed.

The moon controls the tide, not us. It is folly to try to hurry the moon. Eventually, the tide returns but only if we are still enough to wait do we get to experience the joy of its return.

Slow down. There’s no reason to rush your coffee.

[inkaseth]

Friendships last when you give each other the room to evolve. Meeting each new version of your friends and accepting whoever they have chosen to be. Old, long friendships can be beautiful.

- Ozzy Etomi

[inkaseth]

When the Europeans told Cetshwayo kaMpande king of Zulu Kingdom that Shaka Zulu organized, “If you don’t convert to Christianity you will go to hell and burn in fire”.

Cetshwayo kaMpande replied, “Around here we eat fire”

Maybe this is what he meant 👇🏾 #Africa

[inkaseth]

I hate the “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry” criticism so much, it drives me crazy.

Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.

I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.

And if you ask me, there’s a lesson in that - to “suck out the marrow of life” and “live deliberately,” one must also accept help offered from the people in your life who love you. There is no true transcendentalism or individualism without love and friendship behind it.

[inkaseth]

You believe romanticizing life means constantly striving to create a life extraordinary enough to romanticize. But the truth is it's not a matter of creating something extraordinary. It's a matter of realizing the beauty in the life you already have.

There is romance in morning walks. There is artistry in a sunset sky. There is magic in late night talks. There is an entire universe in a person's eyes.

So, if you are looking for extraordinary, you don't have to try. Look in the mirror, start with yourself.

[inkaseth]

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

[inkaseth]

It's time to kill the idea that we can only grow and heal when we're uncomfortable.

You heal every time you have a good conversation with someone. You heal every time you laugh. You heal every time something makes you smile genuinely. You heal every time you have fun creating something, anything. You heal every time you get so absorbed in your routine that your struggles cease for a while.

There is, in fact, lots of healing and growth to be found inside your comfort zone.

[inkaseth]

You have to move your body and get out and look at things. You have to talk to people and eat strange food, travel if you can, watch movies with subtitles, listen to music outside of your habits, go to art galleries and concerts, do things you're bad at. You have to challenge yourself, keep learning new things, participate.

And all of these things fall under the umbrella of "Stay curious." And you have to have fun.

- A Conversation with Richard Siken by Thomas Hobohm

[inkaseth]

Your twenties are not about saving money or networking or adhering to beauty standards,

Your twenties are about seeing the world, forging friendships, giving up on being sexy, embracing your flaws, letting your eyebrows live a little and thus inadvertently becoming sexy.

Your twenties should be for planting cabbages and ixoras so that your heart becomes a garden rather than a stormy, restless sea.

[inkaseth]

Working out is supposed to be good and fun and useful in stimulating my brain to produce serotonin so how the hell do I instead feel the random urge to burst into tears at the gym.

I’m literally watching my mood plummet after every program.😭

[inkaseth]

Claire Schwartz, from “Lecture on Loneliness”

[inkaseth]

“When I feel I don’t love anything I try to get to the ocean. When I think I have a bad molar I try to get to the ocean. When I fail to use the subjunctive I try to get to the ocean. Sometimes I succeed.”

— Bob Hicok, from ‘A prodigal in shitty weather’

[inkaseth]

The Darbur Festival is an annual cultural, religious and equestrian festival celebrated in several northern cities of Nigeria. The Kano Durbar which I witnessed is the largest procession of colorful horses in the world. It marks the Islamic holidays Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha.

[inkaseth]

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and, when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.

Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin