Notes To Self: Who You Want To Be?

"Instead of asking yourself who you are—ask yourself who you want to be. The makeup of your character is not a puzzle with a set number of pieces. Every endeavour, adventure, challenge, and connection you experience over the course of your life weaves another thread into the tapestry of who you are. The work of self is never finished. You are a masterpiece in progress. 

Live boldly in the light of this, a life where every decision and action you take is made with the conscious intention of bettering yourself, your circumstances, or expanding your perspective in some way. 

Challenge yourself often, take greater risks, step out of your comfort zone, and avoid slipping into long, stagnant slumps. Remember that no matter the milestones you reach in life, you are never a completed project. The growing mustn’t stop simply because you have reached adulthood, established your career, fulfilled your dreams, or found your life partner. The soul is a rose that should bloom time and again over the span of a life, becoming more beautiful and intricate with every progression. 

Live like this—with a full, hungry heart, and a curiousness that cannot be extinguished. Practice self-reflection and tend to the hollow spaces in you where you find them. If you lack confidence, focus on your health and wellbeing, or develop new skills. If you feel flat and uninteresting, further your studies, or better yet, travel to far and foreign places. Expand your horizons and watch how the people flock to you. If you have emotional issues and trauma, reach out for help, search your own spirit, and heal at the root of the cause. Your flaws and shortcomings do not define you, they are just paths you haven’t explored yet. Anything can be mended or developed through focus and concentrated effort. 

Remember, it is the pursuit of happiness, not the seizing of it. A whole and happy life means routinely finding new things to chase and become. It is to look at this world with clear, open eyes and see just how much there is here to live for."

Notes To Self: Love Yourself

"It's okay to want to be on your own for a little while. It’s okay to want to spend your time selfishly, or to put your needs and wants before anyone else’s. It’s okay to be lazy, to be active, to over-work, to veg out in bed all weekend, to hang with friends, or to spend your nights doing whatever the hell you want to do – this is your life, and no one can tell you how to live it. 

We have such a negative perception of being alone, like ‘alone’ equates to loneliness. But it doesn’t have to. Being alone means being independent. It means knowing what you deserve and not settling. It means knowing what you want and not wasting time pursuing something that doesn’t grow you. It means finding your way in a world that’s chaotic and crazy and ever-changing. 

Being alone means being comfortable in your own skin. There’s nothing wrong with being alone. With waking up and making breakfast for one, with third-wheeling alongside your favorite couple friends, with going on long runs with only music and sunshine to keep you company. 

Stop worrying about when and where and how you’ll find your person. Stop feeling like you’re running out of time. Stop comparing your journey to everyone else’s and be happy where you are, right now. You’re doing just fine. And independence looks good on you."

Notes To Self: The Truth About Society

"We have forgotten how to see the world as it actually is and are blinded by appearances. We see people as statistics, educational as functional, food as fuel, clothing as utilitarian, books as unnecessary luxury, and religion as morality. We vastly over-value what we can experience with the senses.

We spend our days working over our books, counting everything up, claiming ownership of all we can fit in the ledger, and failing to see that we live in a whole, wild universe filled to brim with stars somewhere in the midst of which one, unique rose lives on a planet and calls out for love.

So I hope in the middle of sea of people, you'd find warmth and kindness because it takes grace to remain kind in a cold, cruel world like ours."

Notes To Self: How I Want to Be Loved

"I remember when I was younger and I wanted to be beautiful; now I'm older and I want to be intelligent. I want to burn hearts with brilliance and engulf souls with compassion. I want to be loved and appreciated for my thoughts and nothing else."

Notes To Self: Life Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone

taken from Danau Ranau. South Sumatra

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Step out of your comfort zone. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. For life only happens once, for opportunities don't usually come twice.
Explore. Dream. Discover."

Notes To Self: The Honor of Being Alive

"At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: 

“The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing; not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision (a cocktail, a remix) of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. 

Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely fact of our existences. The honor of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare."

— Caitlin Moran

Notes To Future Son: Date a Girl Who Reads

“You should date a girl who reads.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”

Notes To Self: You Are What You Take From These

“You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. 

You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day. 

So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colors fill your mind until there is nothing left to do but explode. There are no wrong answers. Inspiration is everything. Sit back, relax, and take it all in. 

Now, go out and create something.”

— Jac Vanek