• If we listen to our neighbor with only half our attention, of course we will not be able to answer them or comfort them….We are distracted. They talk, but we do not participate in the conversation; we are immersed in our own thoughts. But if we give them our full attention, then we take up both our own burden and theirs.

    —Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

  • We cannot find our way to true freedom in isolation. Silence without speaking is as dangerous as solitude without community. They belong together.

    —Henri Nouwen

  • Author and speaker Jim Rohn on the best response to the disappointments of life:

    “Let’s face it … people and events are going to continue to both hurt and disappoint you. Among the people will be those you most love, as well as those you least know. Seldom is it their intent to purposely hurt you, but rather, a variety of situations mostly beyond your control will cause them to act, speak, or think in ways which can have an adverse effect upon you, your present feelings and emotions, and the way your life upholds. It has been this way through six thousand years of recorded history, and your hurt or grief is not the first time a human has been deeply hurt by the inappropriate actions of another.

    The only way to avoid being touched by life—the good as well as the bad—is to withdraw from society, and even then you will disappoint yourself, and your imagining about what is going on out there will haunt you and hurt you. Knowing this, there is but one solution that will support you when people and events hurt you, and that is to learn to work harder on your personal growth than anything else. Since you cannot control the weather, or the traffic, or the one you love, or your neighbors, or your boss, then you must learn to control you … the one whose response to the difficulties of life really counts.”

    —James Clear, The Seasons of Life

  • “Perhaps love is to give one’s own solitude to others? For it is the very last thing we have to offer.” 

    —Clarice Lispector, Selected Crônicas

  • “I definitely have had friendships and moments with people from different backgrounds and in different stages of their lives…brief encounters where you know someone for a few days and it seems you’ve had a whole lifetime, and it shapes who you are as a person. To me that’s like the most comforting or best thing in life, when you have a little connection or you both find something funny, and it makes you feel not alone.”

    -Sofia Coppola on Lost in Translation

  • As I began to work on getting my own life back on track, I relegated time with my mother to every other Sunday and holidays, holding her (and our relationship) at arm’s length. What seemed at the time to be self-care and boundaries was also a mixture of avoidance and burden—but I didn’t truly know this until a Tuesday afternoon one day in November.

    She’d called me the night before and I’d ignored it; she was lonely and called me a lot, and I’d decided that I couldn’t always stop what I was doing to answer. But the next day I got a call at work from my brother, telling me to come home at once. When I got there I found that she’d died in her sleep the night before.

    I checked the voicemail that she’d left me. In it she’d asked me to come over and see a movie with her.

    The guilt caved me in.

    The following weeks and months were a blur. I was beside myself with grief, regret, and the illogical thinking that can come with loss: Maybe if I’d come over that night she wouldn’t have died. Maybe if I’d been around more, called more, or been a better daughter, maybe that would have changed things.

    When a Wrong Can’t Be Righted: How to Deal With Regret

  • Sometimes when we have been overcome by pride or impatience, and we want to improve our rough and bearish manners, we complain that we require solitude, as if we should find the virtue of patience there where nobody provokes us: and we apologize for our carelessness, and say that the reason of our disturbance does not spring from our own impatience, but from the fault of our brethren. And while we lay the blame of our fault on others, we shall never be able to reach the goal of patience and perfection.

    —St. John Cassian, Institutes, Book VIII, Chapter XVI. Of the Spirit of Anger.

  • Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.

    —D.H. Lawrence

  • “If you avoid crowds and turn your back on the world, be prepared to act as though you are the one who is making a mistake.”

    —unknown hermit

  • Being a human means accepting promises from other people and trusting that other people will be good to you. When that is too much to bear, it is always possible to retreat into the thought, “I’ll live for my own comfort, for my own revenge, for my own anger, and I just won’t be a member of society anymore.” That really means, “I won’t be a human being anymore.”

    You see people doing that today where they feel that society has let them down, and they can’t ask anything of it, and they can’t put their hopes on anything outside themselves. You see them actually retreating to a life in which they think only of their own satisfaction, and maybe the satisfaction of their revenge against society. But the life that no longer trusts another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer.

    Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How to Live with Our Human Fragility