Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippett
~History always
repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves. ~
~My work has shown me
that spiritual geniuses of the everyday are everywhere. They are in the margins
and do not have publicists. They are below the radar, which is broken. The
discourse of our common life inclines towards despair. ~
~We create
transformative, resilient new realities by becoming transformed, resilient
people.~
~Everything is no
longer political, as the old saying goes, but nearly everything now holds civic
importance.~
~I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can’t
disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you
and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other’s
position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will
probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us. ~
~The world is made up of stories; it’s not made up of facts.
~
~Listening is an everyday social art, but it’s an art we
have neglected and must learn anew.~
~My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the
honesty and eloquence it elicits.~
~People ask me about the common denominators of the wisest
people I’ve encountered. Alongside all the virtues that accompany and anchor
wisdom, there is a characteristic physical presence that Jean Vanier epitomizes
with others I’ve met like Desmond Tutu, Wangari Maathai, Thích Nhât Hanh.
Here’s what it feels like, what I can report: an embodied capacity to hold
power and tenderness in a surprising, creative interplay. This way of being is
palpable, and refreshing, and in its way jarring, hard to figure out. Among
other things, it transmutes my sense of what power feels like and is there for.
This is the closest I can come to describing the sense I have, at this point,
of wisdom incarnate, and it is an experience of physical presence as much as
consciousness and spirit. ~
~Wisdom, of the everyday sort, is about how we reckon with
the surprises and mysteries that make life life as opposed to stasis. Mystery
lands in us as a humbling fullness of reality we cannot sum up or pin down. ~
~I grow if anything more richly rooted in one of the most
inexplicable things he taught me: God is love. ~
Small Great Things: A
Novel by Jodi Picoult
~Marie has no idea how often I have to just take a deep
breath, and move on. White people don’t mean half the offensive things that
come out of their mouths, and so I try not to let myself get rubbed the wrong
way. ~
~Corinne is one of those people for whom life is just the
space between crises. ~
~And then it hits me with the force of a blow: they don’t
have a problem with what I’ve done. Just with who I am. ~
~Anger, it turns out, is a renewable source of fuel. ~
~When I was a child my mother’s intuition was so uncanny it
took me many years to realize she wasn’t psychic. She didn’t know the future;
she just knew me.~
~On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took
me out to dinner. “You’re destined to do small great things,” she told me.
“Just like Dr. King said.” She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If
I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. ~
~If the first freedom you lose in prison is privacy, the
second is dignity.~
~Now I know: adulthood is a line drawn in the sand. At some
point, your child will be standing on the other side.~
~Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart
and then roars when you need silence.~
~It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life
and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a
filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you’ve never truly seen yourself
at all.~
~It is a strange thing, being suddenly motherless. It’s like
losing a rudder that was keeping me on course, one that I never paid much mind
to before now. Who will teach me how to parent, how to deal with the unkindness
of strangers, how to be humble? ~
~She brought me into this world. I will help her leave it. ~
~We all do it, you know. Distract ourselves from noticing
how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the
blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro
cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the
surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day,
you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less
of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this
happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink,
when I was diapering him, when I was young. When this realization hits, you
start doing the math. How much time do I have left? How much can I fit into
that small space? Some of us let this realization guide us, I guess. We book
trips to Tibet, we learn how to sculpt, we skydive. We try to pretend it’s not
almost over. But some of us just fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro
cards and do the grocery shopping, because if you only see the path that’s
right ahead of you, you don’t obsess over when the cliff might drop off. Some
of us never learn. And some of us learn earlier than others. ~
~All mothers worry, but Black mothers, we have to worry a
little bit more.~
~What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn’t fit
into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your
corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit?~
~Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is
taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed.”~
~But even if we took every white supremacist on the planet
and shipped them off to Mars, there would still be racism. That’s because
racism isn’t just about hate. We all have biases, even if we don’t think we do.
It’s because racism is also about who has power…and who has access to it.~
~Freedom is the fragile neck of a daffodil, after the
longest of winters. It’s the sound of your voice, without anyone drowning you
out. It’s having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no.
At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility. I am the same
woman I was five minutes ago. I’m rooted to the same chair. My hands are
flattened on the same scarred table.~
Firefly Lane: A Novel
by Kristin Hannah
~“We’ll be best friends forever,” Kate said earnestly.
“Okay?” “You mean you’ll always be there for me?” “Always,” Kate answered. “No
matter what.” Tully felt an emotion open up inside her like some exotic flower.
She could practically smell its honeyed scent in the air. ~
~Thoughts—even fears—were airy things, formless until you
made them solid with your voice, and once given that weight, they could crush
you.~
~That was what a best friend did: hold up a mirror and show
you your heart. ~
~That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and
mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in
the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in
your darkest hours.~
~Success had only made long days longer.~
~Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and
patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.~
The Key to Rebecca by
Ken Follet
~Bogge never objected to making people send him copies for
the file: it enabled him to poke his finger into things without taking any
responsibility.~
~One man could not win the war, but one man could lose it.~
~Neither of them had ever come close to marrying, for they
were too fond of themselves to love another person. What brought them together
was not love, not even affection, but shared lusts. The most important thing in
life, for both of them, was the indulgence of their appetites.~
~There were brutes everywhere, and sometimes they got into
power, and then you had to fight them.~
~The walls you build to protect you also close you in.~
A Whole New Mind: Why
Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink
~Knowledge workers and their thinking style have indeed
shaped the character, leadership, and social profile of the modern age. ~
~They’ve created an SAT-ocracy—a regime in which access to
the good life depends on the ability to reason logically, sequentially, and
speedily. ~
~For most of history, our lives were defined by scarcity.
Today, the defining feature of social, economic, and cultural life in much of
the world is abundance. ~
~ For businesses, it’s no longer enough to create a product
that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful,
unique, and meaningful, abiding what author Virginia Postrel calls “the
aesthetic imperative.” ~
~High concept involves the ability to create artistic and
emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying
narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention.
High touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of
human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to
stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.~
~Hollywood, Bollywood, and other entertainment centers
revere story. But the rest of society, to the extent anyone even thinks about
it, considers it fact’s less dependable younger sibling. Stories amuse; facts
illuminate. Stories divert; facts reveal.~
~“Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they
are ideally set up to understand stories.” —ROGER C. SCHANK, cognitive
scientist~
~Stories are important cognitive events, for they
encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and
emotion.~
~How did you and your spouse meet? What was your first job?
When was the first time you were away from home overnight? Who was the worst
teacher you ever had? What was the happiest day of your life? The saddest? The
most terrifying? What was the best decision you ever made? You’ll be amazed at
the stories that pour out—and you’ll be thrilled to have them recorded~
~Symphony, as I call this aptitude, is the ability to put
together the pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze;
to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad
patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new
by combining elements nobody else thought to pair. Symphony is also an
attribute of the brain’s right hemisphere in the literal, as well as the
metaphorical, sense.~
Death by Meeting: A
Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business by Patrick
M. Lencioni
~There is simply no substitute for a good meeting—a dynamic,
passionate, and focused engagement—when it comes to extracting the collective
wisdom of a team. The hard truth is, bad meetings almost always lead to bad
decisions, which is the best recipe for mediocrity.~
~Lethargic. Unfocused . Passionless. Those were the most
common words that visitors used to describe what they witnessed after attending
even part of an executive staff meeting.~
~But the point is, consensus is usually not achievable. The
likelihood of six intelligent people coming to a sincere and complete agreement
on a complex and important topic is very low.” “So what do you do?” Michelle
wondered. “You have a passionate, unfiltered, messy, provocative discussion
that ends when the leader of the team decides all the information has been aired.~
~ “The biggest problem with our meetings, and with meetings
in general,” he paused for effect, “is structure.”~
~Meetings are a puzzling paradox. On one hand, they are
critical. Meetings are the activity at the center of every organization. On the
other hand, they are painful. Frustratingly long and seemingly pointless. The
good news is that there is nothing inherent about meetings that makes them bad,
and so it is entirely possible to transform them into compelling, productive,
and fun activities. The bad news is that in order to do this, we will have to fundamentally
rethink much of the way we perceive and manage meetings.~
~That means we cannot keep hating them. And we must abandon
our search for technological solutions that will somehow free us from having to
sit down face to face. And we have to stop focusing on agendas and minutes and
rules, and accept the fact that bad meetings start with the attitudes and
approaches of the people who lead and take part in them.~
~To make meetings less boring, leaders must look for
legitimate reasons to provoke and uncover relevant, constructive ideological
conflict.~
~While it is true that much of the time we currently spend
in meetings is largely wasted, the solution is not to stop having meetings, but
rather to make them better. Because when properly utilized, meetings are
actually time savers. That’s right. Good meetings provide opportunities to
improve execution by accelerating decision making and eliminating the need to
revisit issues again and again.~
A Religion of One's
Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World by Thomas
Moore
~To be religious even in a personal way, you have to wake up
and find your own portals to wonder and transcendence.~
~ Georgia O’Keeffe didn’t paint Madonnas; she painted
flowers and skulls, but she portrayed them with such vibrancy and symbolic
innuendo that their sacredness is inescapable. ~
~God is in the space between sentences. God is the unspoken
and unwritten. God is who is summoned but not seen.~
~Spiritual traditions around the world, large and small,
have two major gifts to offer: wisdom and beauty.~
