Quotes From "Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life"...Part 2

I continue here with the passages that are marked in my copy of this book by Gregg Levoy:

On the "Past":

"The past contains hints about "the deeper-than-conscious goals toward which the movement of our lives is trying to take us."

* * *

"The past reminds us of our struggles with our destinies."

* * *

"By opening the inactive file...we may discover the lost opportunities of our lives."

* * *

"...our past begs the question inherent in any history: Does it have a goal?"

* * *

"The past can't be changed, only your attitude toward it can."

On "Calls" and "Callings":

"In a sense, patterns are calls."

* * *

"The dream that won't go away is a call, as is the symptom that recurs, the section of the bookstore you always go to first, and the lesson you've endlessly had to learn or are intent upon impressing on your children."

* * *

"...it often turns out that calls are echoes coming out of the chasms in our lives."

* * *

"We decline the invitation of our callings because we feel inadequate to the task, but the opposite is also true. We're afraid of our own power."

* * *

"Sometimes we're robbed of our calls by the fate into which we fell headlong at birth."

* * *

"When the brass ring comes around in life, kiddo, you'd better grab it, because it may never come around again."

* * *

"Much of the pain associated with callings comes from avoiding them, from not surrendering to them."

On "Shadows":

"...it is what we despise in people, or envy, or worship, or become obsessed with."

On "Healing":

"...once he had touched the wound in himself, he could bring healing touch to that same wound in others."

On the "Right Path":

"If it feels safe, it's probably not the right path, but if it scares you, it probably is."

On our "Power":

"It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."

On "Conformity":

"Don't sit down in life. All through your life you're going to be asked to sit down, to conform, comply, and compromise, and it can be very deadly if you get in the habit of doing that."

* * *

"Be leery of the price of conformity. Stand up, create things, do things."

On the "Mind":

"The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."

On "Freedom":

"Until you actually make a choice, freedom is only potential energy, energy in abeyance, in waiting."

On "Other's Opinion":

"...in the course of life a small number of people will like you, a small number will dislike you, and the vast majority won't care one way or the other."

* * *

"If we look only to others to show us who we are...then the reflections we'll have of ourselves will always be distorted a little."

On "Parents":

"When we attempt to carry our parents' unfulfilled lives, we squeeze out our own."

On "Self-esteem":

"Ironically, it's a function of self-esteem that we resist our callings."

On "Insincerity":

"The most exhausting thing in my life is being insincere."

On "Timing":

"The skill that seems most essential for such leaps is a certain feel for ripeness."

On "Change":

"If you're taking chances and making changes just for the sake of not standing still, your action may be more about running away from something than moving toward something."

* * *

"Motion is not necessarily progress any more than noise is necessarily music."

* * *

"By trying to shelter ourselves from change, we isolate ourselves from living."

* * *

"An ordeal may serve the purpose of shaking us loose from our moorings in order to set us up for important changes we can't see or imagine yet."

On "Risk":

"Is the payoff worth more than the pain?"

* * *

"...the important risks we don't take now become the regrets we have later."

On "Sacrifice":

"Sacrifice is the shadow in the calling."

On "Fear":

"Fear is a signal that you're close to something vital and that your call is worthy of you."

On "Life":

"Your life mirrors what you put into it or withhold from it."

* * *

"...the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."

On the "Secret to Success":

"You've got to ask! Asking is, in my opinion, the world's most powerful--and neglected--secret to success."

On "Best Mentors":

"The best mentors are also those who are students at the same time, other people's mentorees."

On "Great Struggles":

"Great struggles aren't inevitably followed by great triumphs and then great vacations. Sometimes great struggles are followed by more great struggles. Maybe triumph and reward ensue,and maybe not."

--Gregg Levoy

Quotes From "The Five People You Meet In Heaven"

This is another of those books I bought on impulse, based on its author's reputation and the reading enjoyment its title promised me. I liked Mitch Albom's "Tuesday's With Morrie" so, having caught my interest in his writing, this book was easier to sell to me. As for the title, I have always wondered how other people (authors, in particular) thought about life after death. From what I scribbled on the book's flyleaf, I bought this on December 20, 2003. Very close to Christmas, so we must have been on another of those shopping-cramming jaunts when I spotted this volume. Here are my bookmarked passages:

On Endings:

"...all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."

On True Love:

"Every life has one true-love snapshot."

On Life Stories:

"No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river."

On Final Words:

"How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?"

* * *

"...when your time came, it came, and that was that. You mght say something smart on your way out, but you might just as well say something stupid."

On Heaven and birth places:

"People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners."

* * *

"...that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."

* * *

"People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless."

* * *

"That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays."

On the Greatest Gift from God:

"This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for."

On Random Acts:

"...there are no random acts...we are all connected...you can no ore separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

On Fairness:

"Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."

On Life and Death:

"...all lives intersect...death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

On Strangers:

"Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."

On What We Waste:

"No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

On War, Courage and Cowardice:

"Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because hey want to. Always, they feel they have to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.

* * *

"War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them too."

* * *

" In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to belive in. When you find one, hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole."

On Sacrifices:

"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

On Parents:

"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."

* * *

"Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away."

On Sons and Fathers:

"...sons will adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion."

* * *

"Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation."

On Love:

"People say they 'find' love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes any forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love."

On the Secret of heaven:

"...each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

--Mitch Albom