Bad Things Are Going To Happen: Love Notes For The End of the World

"This, too, shall pass" doesn't mean that only the hard things will pass. The soft, easy, beloved things will pass, too. Everything is temporary. Honor what's here when it's here, whatever it is.

You may experience something that severs your life into two halves - before and after. People will encourage you to move on, move passed, get over and get on with it. They will want you to act normal. Don't you let them push you around. You know in your gut that you will never normalize, that it's never going to be the same again. There's nothing wrong with you. It's the most natural thing in the world to lose and to grieve and to live on with that hurt contained inside of your heart. Let it be.

You can tell something was there by the size and shape of the hole it left once it’s gone.

You will come one day looking for evidence. For what is left, for what was true, for what is yours. For something you can't name, won't know for many years. You probably won't find what you're looking for. Maybe you will find yourself.

You can know a thing that is hard to know if you will remain resolute past the point that it threatens everything you knew before.

Every choice you make shapes you and shapes your life like clay, soft and malleable until suddenly it isn’t anymore. Each choice for something is a choice against something else, so be thoughtful with your choices. You and your life and your art. Live with an artist’s sensibility. See and feel ahead of your choices and work the clay deliberately with soft hands. You can always start over.

Bad things are going to happen.

Your heart will be broken. You will break your own heart. Get good at holding the pieces softly and loving them, shattered as they are. You are under no obligation to mend so well that no one notices that damage. Let the cracks run deep.

A time will come when you have to accept something you can't accept, but you will try, and this trying to accept will become your life. Make it a good life. Don't let anyone tell you that your trying to accept what is here is the same as giving up. 

Life is a series of inequitable choices, one after another, and some hardly seem like choices at all because so much is out of your hands; but, you always have some small, even barely perceptible choice and that is where your power comes from.

Be a humble student of your life because it will instruct you in all you need to know. Be gracious when it offers you a lesson. Some lessons will hurt you. Pain is not your enemy.

You can't see the future. It is not for you to illuminate all of the dark places. Shine your light on now. Now is all there is.

Sometimes you need to do your work in private, and your breath is best spent on a long exhale or a scream or a sob, and your hands are put to best use pressed tight to your chest or outstretched in surrender. You're under no obligation to be presentable, and you don't owe anyone an explanation.

That space between "not anymore" and "not yet," so vast and eerily quiet, is full of grace.

From your sorrow, learn compassion. From your anger, learn forgiveness. From your fear, learn courage. From your oppression, learn to reclaim your power.

The new normal will look and feel nothing like the old normal. You are called now to acknowledge what is, to accept it, to make space for it, to form an uneasy alliance with this thing you never wanted that is here. Normal means something else now. This is a hard truth. But take heart: you can learn to live with hard truths.

Keep staying, keep going.