they graffitied on the walls of the city, sometimes the very ones  on which was already printed Défense d’afficher (‘It is forbidden to post’).  Défense de ne pas afficher (‘It is forbidden not to post’), someone wrote on the wall at Sciences-Po in 1968*
(Lauren Elkin)

The greatest gift you can give to a person is to see who she is and to reflect back to her, when we help people to be who they want to be, to take back permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

There’s such a thing a hostile brand.  Youngme Moon describes how,

‘Instead of laying down the welcome mat, they lay down the gauntlet.’^

The hostile life is not easy to find, it’s almost as though it doesn’t want to be found.  When we cross its threshold, though, we realise that it has been our own reluctance to something more difficult, more challenging, more demanding that has made it appear as it has.  In the movie Avatar Jake Sully will know which flying banshee he must bond to because it will be the one that will try to kill him – a picture for the way before us being the one that will demand much of us:

There are many easy ways, this is not one of them.

(*From Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse.)
(**From Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)
(^From Youngme Moon’s Different.)

Other blue reading:
Create Dangerously by Albert Camus.
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb.
How to give a five-minute presentation (blog) by Seth Godin.
Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor (blog) by Brain Pickings.
Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King.
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.