Kidding by Laura Jane Williams

Author:Laura Jane Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

The thing I am too scared to admit I dream about:

18

abandoning what isn’t working

A child doesn’t persevere with what isn’t working out of some stubborn sense of pride. If it doesn’t work, they quit!

They move on!

THEY DO NOT THINK ABOUT IT AGAIN!

How freeing.

How freeing not to give a shit about what it means to “give up.”

When they can’t do question six on a biology test, they leave it blank and head on over to question seven. When they can’t build the Taj Mahal out of their birthday Lego, they mash a bunch of bricks together and call it “The Princesses Tower of Freedom in Heaven Where Everyone Gets a Puppy.” It’s not giving up when a kid swaps Barbie for books, or gets bored by Monopoly and so starts enacting a scene with the dog and top hat. Abandoning what isn’t working doesn’t make you a “failure,” because there is no “fail,” remember?

You don’t have to carry on when the thing you’re carrying on with is emphatically just not coming together.

A book you’re struggling with, the unsatisfactory relationship you have with your hair stylist, a marriage or friendship or project or shit cup of tea.

Sometimes, abandoning what isn’t working is about being brave, and being brave is often about letting people help you so that you don’t have to have your shit together this morning. This week. This month, or year. So stop. Quit.

This book (this life) isn’t about faking a childlike enthusiasm for your own existence until it becomes truth. Feigning enthusiasm until you really do feel it.

This is a book (life) about owning your truth, and sometimes your truth is bone-goddamn-tired. Remember what else we said? The thing about sleep? Because it’s okay to need a break.

When we’re so bogged down in the sludge of our lives, sometimes it is best to cease walking.

To stand still.

Progress isn’t always a forward force—progress can be taking stock of who we are and what we’ve got and what brought us this far.

When the thing we most want continues to elude us, perhaps that thing isn’t for us. Not ever, or maybe just for now. Sometimes the thing we want is a butterfly: it will come and rest on our shoulder, gently and quietly, but we have to stop chasing it first.

We have to learn to exhale as much as inhale, let go as much as seek.

(I wish I could tattoo that sentence to the inside of my eyelids.)

Sometimes we have to use hurt, or discontent, or unease—listen to it—in order to inform our next decisions. Slowing down the senses by stopping, or quitting for a while, it helps us to identify what feels good. You know—rather than risking doing things because they make us feel at all. Because, we think busyness is a virtue. In quitting for a minute, we know what feels good for real, and we can lean, then, into that. We can hear the guiding voices more clearly in the silence.

Noor Shirazie says that if flowers can teach themselves to bloom after winter passes, then so can you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.