Out of reach

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.

-Michelangelo

Keep in mind

The Stoic: 9 Principles to Help You Keep Calm in Chaos

 

“Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able — be good.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Truth

For the individual, there is no such thing as theoretic truth; a great truth that is not absorbed by our whole mind and life, and has not become an inseparable part of our living, is not a real truth to us. If we know the truth and do not live it, our life is—a lie.

“The Power of Truth”
From The Power of Truth: Individual Problems and Possibilities, 1902
By William George Jordan

Derived

"No, we don't put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice. That was our story, and it is easy to infer from it - and from similar stories - that the confusion is generalised. The theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite - ex cura theoria nascitur."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile, pg 221

Answering the Dreaded “So, What Do You Do?” Question

...he can begin to write a mental story of this life change by visualizing each of the pieces of the move: the new apartment, the transit ride, the crowds of people, the winter conditions. By visualizing each area of uncertainty and how he can positively deal with the components, he will make the idea less scary and more possible. The key distinction, however, is that you’re not only visualizing an outcome: you’re also visualizing each step of the process.

Your present narrative, the one you used at the after-work party, the rambling that might have included, “We’re thinking about having kids, and I might work on an essay, but I don’t feel like a writer just yet,” can begin to shift. As you identify ways you can pull from your future narratives, you can use them in the present. This subtle change shifts your language to “We’re going to have kids in the next few years,” and “I am a writer; I’m working on several pieces and my dream is to write a book in the next couple of years.” This becomes a better story, and it also helps push you in the direction of your goals.

Would have

As the poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote: “Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are ‘It might have been.’” “I should have” and “I wish I had” are two more of history’s saddest sentences.

Extremes

"More barbells. Do crazy things (break furniture once in a while), like the Greeks during the later stages of a drinking symposium, and stay “rational” in larger decisions. Trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never middlebrow stuff. Talk to either undergraduate students, cab drivers, and gardeners or the highest caliber scholars; never to middling-but-career-conscious academics. If you dislike someone, leave him alone or eliminate him; don’t attack him verbally."

"...anything that removes the risk of ruin will get us to such a barbell."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile, p166

Stoicism

"Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile...

An intelligent life is all about such emotional positioning to eliminate the sting of harm, which as we saw is done by mentally writing off belongings so one does not feel any pain from losses. The volatility of the world no longer affects you negatively.

The modern stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistake into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

...invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us - not good deeds and acts of virtue."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile, p154-156

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED 
Bill Watterson

"We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.
You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury...

...We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success."

I think about your thighs,' he wrote in the second letter, 'and the warm, moist smell of your skin in the morning, and the tiny eyelash in each corner of your eye that I always notice when you first roll over to look at me. I don’t know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else. I don’t know why your body is something I can’t stop thinking about, why those little flaws and ridges on your back are lovely to me or why the pale soft bottoms of your New Jersey feet that always wore shoes are more poignant than any other feet, but they are. I thought I would have more time to chart your body, to map its poles, its contours and terrains, its inner regions, both temperate and torrid - a whole topography of skin and muscle and bone. I didn’t tell you, but I imagined a lifetime as your cartographer, years of exploration and discovery that would keep changing the look of my map. It would always need to be redrawn and reconfigured to keep up with you. I’m sure I’ve missed things, Bill, or forgotten them, because half the time I’ve been wandering around your body blind drunk with happiness. There are still places I haven’t seen.'

Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

So is it now I am a man

The Child Is the Father to the Man: 9 Foundational Habits Young Men Should Start Now to Raise Themselves Right

"... at this very moment, you are creating or “fathering” the man you will be in five, ten, and twenty years. So you want to be a successful, financially secure, physically fit, and well-adjusted forty-year-old? What actions are you taking NOW as a twenty-year-old to father that man?"

Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about. 

 

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion 

Dandy

Mr. Talese does concede that's he's not necessarily aligned with the times. "Now I'm an old guy, a retro fellow, maybe even stuffy. But dressing conscientiously is exalting in the act of being alive. When you go out on the town, it's an act of celebration…that you're here."

-Jacket (Not) Required

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Don’t depend too much on anyone in this world because even your own shadow leaves you when you are in darkness. Ibn Taymiyyah