on the low tho

“History, I contend, is the present — we, with every breathe we take, every move we make, are History — and what goes around, comes around.”

“What one does not remember dictates who one loves or fails to love.”

“We know so well that often folks did the best that they could do given difficult and oftentimes harsh circumstances. However, to regain emotional well-being we have to be able to see the bad that emerged in these settings as well as the good.”

The human spirit has infinite capacity. We can hold within us a paradox. We can experience both joy and sadness. The joy does not diminish the loss; the loss does not diminish the joy. Sometimes we live as if we need to make a choice between positive and negative emotions, as if to choose one is to betray the other. We seem to say, how can I be happy when I have the sadness of loss, when I live with uncertainty, when a loved one is suffering, when the world is suffering? Or, we say, how can I live in sadness when there is so much to be grateful for, so many blessings, so much reason for gladness? And sometimes we live as if we are in competition for the attention and admiration of others. We want them to choose us, to love us, to pay attention to us. But people have an infinite capacity to love, if they are not made to choose. We can love completely and utterly, so much, so many. The human spirit has infinite capacity to feel all things, to live as if all is possible, to love, to imagine, to experience, to hope, to rise above

Something painful happened in your life. Go back gently. Touch that place. Go through that place. Feel what it feels like. Because if you feel it, you will go through it. Promise yourself that when you’re feeling what you feel, you’ll give yourself permission to be true to that. Aaron wanted to shut down. He lost his two boys. His life was over. How would he ever regroup? The Torah says to Aaron, ‘Gently enter that place again.’ Walk in. Because if you don’t it’s going to keep coming up again and again.

We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything.

Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word “love” is the source of our difficulty in living. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying.

Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.