Directed by Louis Malle • 1963 • France
Category: TRANSCIENCE
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What difference can we discover between two persons who lived a century ago? The one died twenty years before the other, but now they are both gone; the separation which then seemed so abrupt and so long, appears as nothing to us, and was, in fact, but short.
—François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress -
When scientists study people on their deathbed and how they feel about their lives, they usually find that many of them feel some serious regrets. I think a lot of those regrets stem from the fact that most of us aren’t really taught about path-making in our childhoods, and most of us also don’t get much better at path-making as adults, which leaves many people looking back on a life path that didn’t really make sense, given who they are and the world they lived in.
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“We are sad, or panicked, because a part of us recognises that time is running out and that we are not presently doing what we should with what remains of our lives. The anguish of Sunday evening is our conscience trying to stir us inarticulately into making more of ourselves.”
What Is That Sunday Evening Feeling? -
Here’s the part that will make you cry. Try to see this moment as though it’s actually in the past, and this person is gone now. You’re remembering this one ordinary moment, in perfect detail, from that precious window of time when your lives still overlapped.
It’s important that it’s an ordinary moment, because those are the kinds of moments that often seem neutral in value. Abundant and unremarkable. You might be tempted to spend it checking your phone.
But if your mind can find that place, even for a just a second, where you see that this might not be so, you’ll break that sense that nothing special is happening.
Then there will be a moment when you come back to reality. And the reality is that the precious, fleeting time when you got to be near this person, the time you’d do anything to revisit, is happening right now.HOW TO CREATE GRATITUDE
David Cain -
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch -
People carry their loved ones with them. They are forever present, and life is full of easily grasped opportunities to show them one’s affection.
—Tove Jansson, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories -
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.
Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.
But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be… for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
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People who do not know where they are going or what kind of world they are heading toward, who wonder if bringing forth children into this chaotic world is not an act of cruelty rather than love, will often be tempted to be sarcastic or even cynical. They laugh at their busy friends, but have nothing to offer in place of their activity. They protest against many things, but do not know what to witness for.
—Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer
