30 Reasons To Keep On Keeping On
1. Nothing beautiful ever came from an easy life. Nothing truly incredible ever came from times of ease and contentment. We’d never enjoy the daytime if we didn’t have the night.
2. We naturally want to reach for more. Until we literally reach nirvana, we’re designed to be striving for better, and it’s not always the worst thing.
3. With that said, it’s also extremely important to realize the beauty in the art of being. Allowing yourself to embrace the journey, but to rest at whatever step you’re at and enjoy it, as you’ll never be back there again.
4. Real transformations and miracles are always preceded by pain and suffering. Lost things are always just making room for others to be found.
5. If there’s one thing we know about existence, it’s that nothing remains for too long, not even our sorrows.
6. You are a constant unfolding of the thoroughly known and predictable and completely unexpected. You will always be surprised by the latter, and it’s usually a platform for incredible change. Give yourself a chance to experience it.
7. As a rule of thumb, you are always more loved than you think you are. Unfortunately, it’s usually at feeling most unloved that we realize this.
8. The pointless days will add up to something, in the end. Your time is not wasted because you’re not seeing immediate results. Anything worth having is worth waiting for.
9. There’s nothing that isn’t worthwhile if it’s something that brings you happiness. Don’t worry about your greater contributions to society all the time or what it says of you that you are doing this thing or not doing that thing. Let your own happiness be enough for you.
10. One of the biggest problems we have is that we think we always know. We think we know what we’re bound to experience in the next hour, day, week… but we do not. There are incredible feats lurking around your corners, if only you walk up and look around.
11. The only thing that is withholding you from your own happiness is you. If you want change, change. If you want new, create newness. Identifying dissatisfaction is important. Acting on it is crucial.
12. Your life is meant to be survived. Nowhere were you ever told or taught that you would live in a majestic land of beauty and happiness every day. If you’re still surviving (and flourishing, even!) you’re doing all you’re meant to.
13. Don’t let your ego’s desires infiltrate your true nature. Learn to disassociate, and you will find contentment right now.
14. “Okay” and “just enough” is, more often than not, perfectly fine. We are the only ones who torture ourselves for it.
15. It’s never the circumstances that drive us to madness, it’s always our opinions of them.
16. People have this thing where they create a person they want the world to know. It’s a defense mechanism: it won’t hurt if someone attacks what is not truly them. But really, when you realize that an attack on who you are doesn’t change it or take anything from you (other than your own state of mind) you learn to stop devoting your energy to masking, and to see the joy in the vulnerability of just being.
17. Often you’ll put forth your best effort and you’ll fail. Sometimes you’ll have to try a thousand times before you succeed. Once in a while, you’ll have wonderful things fall upon you. All that will matter, though, is how well you accepted it, tried harder, and enjoyed what you were given. Always.
18. When you turn off the narrative in your mind that defines who you are and why you’re here, you’ll usually find that you’re more okay with where you are than not.
19. “There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
20. You do not always know what’s best for yourself. In fact, I like to think that we very rarely do. Let yourself be redirected, it always brings you somewhere better than you had planned to go.
21. The truth is that there is nothing (and nobody) stopping you from doing that one thing. You are the one creating narratives on what should and shouldn’t be, and what people will define you as if you do it. But think of what they’ll define you as if you don’t.
22. It’s always better to be someone who tried and failed as opposed to someone who was too weak to even do so.
23. You will always regret what you didn’t do, but rarely what you did.
24. There is something greater that is guiding your life. You can believe that or not, but everybody finds eventually that there are just too many coincidences to chalk it all up to happenstance. Learn to trust this, and watch it create for you more rapidly.
25. If you’re genuinely unhappy, there’s only one thing you have to do to change everything: think differently.
26. With many things in life, you just have to teach yourself to be happy for what it gives you as opposed to what it doesn’t. For example: a job gives you a steady income, even if it doesn’t allow you to do something you “love” everyday. But the ends outweigh the means.
27. There are always happy things around, you just have to let yourself see them.
28. Above all else, learn to not only have faith in what you know was meant to be, but also that it will come to you in due time. We withhold ourselves from these things because we spend too much time in a mental limbo of whether or not it will come, when at the end of the day, we really do know it will.
29. Few things are to be taken at face value in life. There are greater meanings, misunderstandings, masked emotions and opinions behind nearly everyone and everything. This isn’t to make you paranoid, it’s to open your eyes to the fact that boredom is the result of naivety.
30. There is a time for everything, including stillness and sadness. You will never be able to skip parts of the story you’re writing, so give to them whatever you have, whether it’s sadness and heartache or happiness and joy. Nobody wants to read a book where the main character is in a sustained state of happiness for their entire life. As such, that’s not how you should want to live.