Music Gets Me Through It

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

Love will never be certain, but after collecting thousands of stories, I’m willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all men, women, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When these needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We grow numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick. There are certainly other causes of illness, numbness, and hurt, but the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

How painful is that voice inside your head that shames, blames and belittles you? How many years have you longed to end the struggle and take back your sweet life? The truth is that change is absolutely possible - for you, not just for your friends or people you hear about. For you. No feeling or situation is unworkable. Not heartbreak, not grief, not sadness, not loneliness, not anger. Anything can be felt, sensed, worked through. By inquiring into feelings and beliefs, you can look into and see what is really beneath those compulsions. One taste of this direct knowing and nothing can ever be the same.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can’t have it.

Human beings are made of water–- we were not designed to hold ourselves together rather run freely like oceans like rivers

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.