Are you awake?
Good. Let’s go for a walk. You can sleep later.Scrawled in a notebook somewhere.
Let’s use our legs while we still have them. Let’s breathe clean air while it’s still around. The days will just slip away if we let them escape into the night. Get up. Life starts right now.
Make time to be thoughtful. Read a whole book every week. Get in the car and drive somewhere new. Keep secrets; not from others – but for yourself. Hug everybody. Love the people that matter. Turn off the computer. Use pens. Don’t bend. Anxiety will rob you of the things you may treasure forever; don’t let it. Take pictures that nobody will see. Write things they’ll only read when you’re gone. Smile. Speak confidently to strangers. Take a deep breath, and reconnect.
Feel. Act because of it. Do nothing. Just think. Minimize the things in your life, make room for experience; people; and creating worlds around yourself. Ask people how they feel. Appreciate as much as you can, and expect nothing. Earn respect, but don’t seek it. Have no attachment to the outcome. Call your family; visit them. Tell them how much you appreciate them. Compliment somebody genuinely every single day, especially strangers.
When you start to feel sad; work. When you’re lonely; work. If you aren’t working, you should be walking. If you aren’t walking, you should be taking care of yourself. If you aren’t taking care of yourself, take care of somebody else. Waste no time: it might all be gone tomorrow.
We are going to do truly amazing things in this life, the magnitude of which is directly impacted by how we spend each and every day. Every stroke of the key or mark of the pen is another crucial step toward something that matters. Keep making them. Never stop, especially if it seems meaningless. Some of the most important moments in life came shrouded in panic, suffering, empty-headedness or by accident. Let life’s stream of existence constantly flow through you, only stopping when you’ve got nothing left to give.
An Excerpt from a Letter to Myself
An ongoing practice I attribute a great deal of my mental health and clarity of thought to is the practice of exchanging letters with myself.
This can take the form of a self-interview, where I sit down and write out direct questions in relation to whatever I’m going through at that moment in time, and the honest answers to them – or more frequently: encouraging streams of consciousness exercises like this. I stumbled across this in a notebook recently, and thought the words may offer some encouragement to others as well.
