No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.*
Eleanor Roosevelt

Start by learning to recognise what interests you.
Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter,
So they never learn how to notice,
Not even what interests them.**
Verlyn Klinkenborg

It often feels that I am only beginning to get the hang of living
inside this life.

What if I could begin again?
Knowing what I know now,
What would I leave out and avoid?
What would I leave in and why?

If it were somehow possible to make this wish,
Would I take it from the genie?

Probably not.

Somehow this mix of good, bad and ugly
has brought me here,
And if I were to tinker with any of that,
I suspect I may not be here today –
Doing what I love to do –
But somewhere else entirely.

Walking on earth is a miracle! We do not have to walk in space or on water to experience a miracle. The real miracle is to be awake in the present moment. Walking on the tree earth, we can realise the wonder of being alive.^

*Quoted in Ben Hardy’s Personality isn’t Permanent;
**From Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
^Thich Naht Hahn, quoted in Mary Ruth Broz and Barbara Flynn’s Midwives of an Unnamed Future.