“Your mood can affect your level of motivation, but never let it affect your discipline. Successful people know what they need to do and do it, regardless of how they feel. Don’t miss out on possible opportunities just because you have chosen to be overpowered by temporary feelings.”
—@emma_vogt
Category: DESPONDENCY
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The way I live can look manic or bipolar or narcissistic or self-indulgent or self-abnegating depending on who’s looking. But I’m not depressed or anxious and I’ve never been more productive or happier, because I follow my body and my mind catches up. Or my mind leaps in and my body follows.
ASK MOLLY | Glory – Maybe you want some for yourself. -
it’s easy for a depressed person to look like he’s not working when just lying in bed can feel like work for him.
ASK MOLLY | Hungry! -
Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.
— Naguib Mahfouz -
“Remember always: if your way of life is hard and sorrowful, it is correct; but if you live in comfort, wealth and honour, and still more, in carnal pleasures, you are on the road to perdition. It is quite impossible to attain serenity of mind without enduring many sorrows and depression and for many years.”
—Father Ilian of Mount Athos -
As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell put it in The Conquest of Happiness (1930):
A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.
In 1918, Russell spent four and a half months in Brixton prison for ‘pacifist propaganda’, but found the bare conditions congenial and conducive to creativity:
I found prison in many ways quite agreeable … I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy … and began the work for Analysis of Mind … One time, when I was reading Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, I laughed so loud that the warder came round to stop me, saying I must remember that prison was a place of punishment.
Boredom is but a window to a sunny day beyond the gloom -
The more we talk about things that people don’t like to talk about, the better it is for everyone.
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One of the most valuable findings from my research has been learning the distinction between joy and happiness. I go into this in more detail here, but the gist is that happiness is a state of being — longer-term and more complex — whereas joy is an emotion — immediate, momentary, and visceral. We spend a lot of time in our culture focusing on happiness and the pursuit of it. Because joy seems small, it often can be dismissed as trivial and inconsequential, making it easy to overlook.
Yet focusing on joy instead of happiness has been perhaps the single most life-changing shift to come out of my work. Because joy is small, it’s accessible. I might not know how to be happy on a particular day, but I know that I can find one or two moments of joy that I might not have had otherwise. One more moment of joy every day for a year is 365 more moments of joy, and that is significant!7 EMOTIONAL LESSONS FOR A MORE JOYFUL LIFE
By Ingrid Fetell Lee -
I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.
