Author: Chris Linebarger
Be kind to yourself
May I not punish myself for failing to be the image of perfection my adaptive mind has constructed success to be.
I, right now, am an unforeseen miracle of Existence… and to deny that Is the original sin at the heart of all destruction.
Artwork and quote by Scott Erickson at @scottthepainter
Victor Frankl
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
Jordan Peterson on standing up straight
To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language). To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children. It means shouldering the cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly. It means casting dead, rigid and too tyrannical order back into the chaos in which it was generated; it means withstanding the ensuing uncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better, more meaningful and more productive order.