“It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it.

If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.”

“Recently, I committed myself to PAYING ATTENTION TO THE ACTION I AM DOING AS I DO IT. This is expressed in events major and minor: Forcing myself to watch the mascara wand as I jostle it along my eyelashes, as much as dissolving inside a Rothko at the museum while I lean into the person I love’s shoulder, as writing a shopping list for my grandmother, as all of it. I try not to expect anything of anything, or of me, and it happens, and I love it better. Keep your eyes sharp and your head focused out instead of in. When you stop dissecting everything you go through in the world like it has the potential to augur who you are and what you do henceforth, you’ll begin to respond to the things around you honestly. You’ll just join yourself within whatever action you’re up to—you will conjure yourself by forgetting, instead of needlessly second-guessing, yourself.”

When you think it’s time to come up for air, go deeper. When you think your heart will break, stay there, stay with it. But at the same time, when you think you gotta hold onto something (like who you think you are), let go.

No matter how much you love them, you should always put yourself first

focus on how to feel human emotion

…you shouldn’t be dismayed if a sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before; or if a disquiet plays over your hands and over all your doings like light and cloud-shadow. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself.

Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke