Contentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “What is the sermon like?” Herbert asked. “There are some intelligent men there, I believe.” “Don’t talk about these boring things, Karen!” Jacob yelled, bringing his fork splat down on his plate and causing a brief volcanic eruption of gravy and cabbage. “Ssh . . . It’s interesting what Karen is saying, Jacob,” Jenifer protested, wiping gravy from her cheek. “It is interesting, up to a point,” Herbert conceded. “Remarkable that reasonably educated people can go on believing in the virgin birth or the Trinity. Might as well believe in the Olympian pantheon. I mean, why Jehovah rather than Apollo? Frankly, I think Apollo might be the more appealing option.” I could see his point. Jehovah had done little enough for me. Perhaps I should give Apollo a try. “Catholicism doesn’t seem to have made you very happy,” Jenifer remarked, echoing my own thoughts and ducking as Jacob hurled a potato across the room. It spattered steamily on the large mirror, and there were exclamations of protest. “Jacob, eat up now!” “How could the Catholic Church possibly make anybody happy?” Herbert grinned at me. He enjoyed baiting me about the notorious abuses of history. “Centuries of oppression and fear. The Inquisition, the sale of indulgences . . .” “The immorality of the popes,” I threw in. “Book burning. Pogroms.” “Jesuits and equivocation!” “This conversation has been going on for too long! Talk about something else,” Jacob demanded at the top of his voice. “We don’t want to hear about churches and popes and all that stuff!” “All right.” Jenifer turned to him. “You start a conversation.” “Let’s talk about Bonfire Night.”3 Jacob relaxed now that the conversation was within his range. The fifth of November was one of the landmarks of Jacob’s year. He started looking forward to it months in advance. At first he had been terrified by the noise of the fireworks and the lurid effigies of Guy Fawkes, but Nanny and his parents had managed to coax him out of his fears by making a little festival of it. “Daddy, tell about how it will get dark and you will light the bonfire.” “And the flames will start to crackle in the twigs,” Herbert obliged. “Snap, crackle, and pop!” “And you will be so excited, Jacob,” Jenifer put in, “when the fireworks start.” “Whoosh! But Karen, you may be a little bit frightened. Just at first. But I’ll say to you, ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be scared of.’ ” “Thank you, Jacob.” “Daddy! Who was Guy Fawkes?” “He was a Catholic!” Herbert shouted in glee, pushing his chair back from the table, while the meal ended in laughter. I followed the nurse down the corridor, inhaling that inimitable hospital smell, catching glimpses of other people’s dramas. Blue bedspreads, a trolley, a wheelchair. “Straight down to the end,” the nurse told me cheerily, “and your friend is in the small ward on your left.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This, of course, is how we should approach religious discourse. Theology is—or should be—a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a difficult piece of music. It is no good trying to listen to a late Beethoven quartet or read a sonnet by Rilke at a party. You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you forever. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth, or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualization. If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its own inviolable holiness. I had found this to be true in my study of literature. As soon as I had stopped trying to use it to advance my career, it began to speak to me again. Now I was having exactly the same experience with theology. The religious traditions have all stressed the importance of silence. They have reminded the faithful that these truths are not capable of a simply rational interpretation. Sacred texts cannot be perused like a holy encyclopedia, for clear information about the divine. This is not the language of everyday speech or of logical, discursive prose. In some traditions, words are thought to contain the sacred in their very sound. When Hindus chant the syllable aum, its three distinct phases evoke the essence of the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, while the silence that follows when the reverberation of the chant has finally died away expresses the attainment of Brahman, the supreme but unspeakable reality. Other scriptures are chanted or sung in a liturgical setting that separates them from profane speech and endows them with the nonconceptual attributes of music. You have to listen to them with a quietly receptive heart, opening yourself to them either in ritual or through yogic disciplines designed to abolish secular modes of thought. That is why so many of the faiths have developed a form of the monastic life, which builds a disciplined silence into the working day.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  HONOR AUTHENTICITY LOVE TRUST Values at Work Values out of context are only words with little meaning. To see how they work as inspiration and direction in expansion practice, let’s revisit Maria, Eric, and Samantha. Maria wanted to move beyond her hypochondriasis and she was willing to feel more anxiety in the short run by dropping some of her safety strategies of checking and seeking reassurance. She’d identified a more expansive mind-set to cultivate, one that allowed for uncertainty about her physical sensations. It was a good, sound plan. Tired of hugging the shore, Maria was ready to push off for uncharted waters. But what about when the water got rough? What were the values that would inspire Maria and help her stay on course? When I asked Maria what values were more important to her than feeling safe and certain, she was surprised at how hard it was to identify them. But when I showed her the values chart she had no trouble naming them. Fun, Flexibility, Adventure, Resilience, Presence I suggested Maria enter them in her smartphone, so when she felt lost and needed to get her bearings, they would serve to remind her of what inspired her practice. And that’s exactly what they did. Eric’s expansion practice was to restrict the time he allowed himself to making decisions, and to accept invitations to social events. Both intentions threatened his monkey mind-set—that if he made mistakes he’d be judged and rejected by others. I asked Eric why he was willing to do this. What was more important to him than safety? Here are the values that he came up with: Self-Acceptance, Commitment, Authenticity, Growth, Resilience, Courage Eric kept a list of these values on the back of his business card in his wallet where they’d always be in reach. And over the course of his practice he reached for them often. The only value Samantha had been honoring was safety for her son. While it sounded noble, Samantha knew it wasn’t leading her in the direction she wanted—usually just to her phone or her checkbook. When she looked over the Values List she was able to find some worthy replacements. And for clarity’s sake, she refined them a bit. Health (my own), Trust (in my son), and Responsibility (to myself) To remind herself of her values, she changed the home screen on her phone from a photo of her son to a photo of herself. When she was tempted to dial him to check up on him, she was reminded to whom her real responsibility was. She planned to change the photo back someday but only after she had her values straight. Is your I must be certain, I cannot make mistakes, I am responsible for everybody mind-set leading you away from your values? What is the toll this is taking in your life? What are the values you want to be directed by?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly colored William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the Oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantel-piece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to bare essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. All were a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people, and to material objects if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow. Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life. My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social, and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the fifties, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties, and girls were clad in demure twin sets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanor of these young people was even more startling. They had long, flowing hair instead of the tidy, repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged, and often eccentric—flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely Eastern robes.

• From Wild (2012)

  That’s how I felt by the time I dragged into the Shelter Cove Resort: spent and bored with the trail, empty of every single thing except gratitude I was there. I’d hopped another of my squares in the Oregon hopscotch. Shelter Cove Resort was a store surrounded by a rustic set of cabins on a wide green lawn that sat on the shore of a big lake called Odell that was rimmed by green forests. I stepped onto the porch of the store and went inside. There were short rows of snacks and fishing lures and a cooler with drinks inside. I found a bottle of Snapple lemonade, got a bag of chips, and walked to the counter. “You a PCT hiker?” the man who stood behind the cash register asked me. When I nodded, he gestured to a window at the back of the store. “The post office is closed until tomorrow morning, but you can camp for free at a spot we’ve got nearby. And there are showers that’ll cost you a buck.” I had only ten dollars left—as I’d now come to expect, my stops in Ashland and Crater Lake National Park had been pricier than I’d imagined they’d be—but I knew I had twenty dollars in the box I’d get the next morning, so when I handed the man my money to pay for the drink and the chips, I asked him for some quarters for the shower. Outside, I cracked open the lemonade and chips and ate them as I made my way toward the little wooden bathhouse the man had pointed out, my anticipation tremendous. When I stepped inside, I was pleased to see that it was a one-person affair. I locked the door behind me, and it was my own domain. I’d have slept inside it if they’d let me. I took off my clothes and looked at myself in the scratched-up mirror. It wasn’t only my feet that had been destroyed by the trail, but it seemed my hair had been too—made coarser and strangely doubled in thickness, sprung alive by layers of dried sweat and trail dust, as if I were slowly but surely turning into a cross between Farrah Fawcett in her glory days and Gunga Din at his worst.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Herbert, come and see.” A small rosebush had somehow forced its way up from the foundations, broken through the floorboards, and grown, thin and spindly, to a height of eighteen inches. “It’s a tree!” Jacob danced ecstatically. “Growing in the drawing room!” “Nature reasserts itself against the thin veneer of human civilization. If you can call this civilized,” Herbert mused. “Isn’t there a poem about that?” He looked at me interrogatively. “Something about ‘laughing Ceres’?” “Pope. The ‘Epistle to Burlington,’ ” I replied. “He’s making fun of that awful country house. ‘Deep harvests bury all his pride has planned.’ ” “ ‘And laughing Ceres reassume the land.’ ” Rose tree and all else forgotten, Herbert went back to the drawing room and started rummaging in a bookcase for a copy of Pope’s collected works. “You should keep that rose tree,” I said to Jenifer, as we maneuvered the bookcase out of the room with some difficulty. Herbert glanced up benignly from the sofa, spectacles askew, clutching the book in a somewhat awkward grasp. “Marvelous poem!” he beamed, watching our efforts absently. And so, yet again, a new life began. Within a few weeks, I had managed to impose a shape on my day. I had a gas ring in my room, but was allowed to use the Harts’ kitchen whenever I wished. Not that I ever attempted any elaborate cooking: it was simply a question of scrambling eggs and heating cans of soup. But even if I had been more ambitious, it would not have mattered. There was never any hint that I was in the way or interrupting family life. There was no family life, as such. This was a household of separate individuals, who shared a house cooperatively. Nanny was not the starchy Gorgon I had feared, but a sweet-faced, aging woman who battled bravely with the mounting chaos of the house. She and Jacob usually ate breakfast together, while Herbert, Jenifer, and I queued up politely for cooker or kettle, preparing our own meals. During the day, Herbert and Jenifer lunched and often dined in their respective colleges. If she was at home, Jenifer’s suppers were as perfunctory as my own, whereas Herbert enjoyed preparing experimental little messes for himself. The day would begin with a great deal of coming and going. Herbert would plunge back and forth in his dressing gown between the kitchen and his study/bedroom with mugs of coffee, which he tended to park and forget. Nanny would retrieve some of them later in the day. Jenifer would sit in the dining room, looking gaunt and weary in a brown camel-hair dressing gown that had seen better days, black National Health spectacles on her nose, studying the newspapers. Jacob chattered ceaselessly, snatching pages from his mother and reading out phrases at the top of his voice, which sounded surreal when isolated in this way. “ ‘Crisis Looms’!” he would announce portentously. “Mummy—‘The— Trend—Persists’!

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  65 The dispassion of paedeia also informed the doctrine of the Trinity, which these three men, often known as the Cappadocian Fathers, developed toward the end of the Arian crisis. They had been uneasy about these disputes, strident on both sides, each of which had cultivated a hardened certainty about these ineffable matters. The Cappadocians practiced the silent, reticent prayer designed by Evagrius of Pontus, in part to strip the mind of such angry dogmatism. They knew that it was impossible to speak about God as we speak about ordinary matters, and the Trinity was designed first to help Christians realize that what we call God lay beyond the reach of words and concepts. They would also introduce Christians to a meditation on the Trinity that would help them to develop attitudes of restraint in their own lives, enabling them to counter aggressive and bellicose intolerance. Many Christians had been confused by the creed of Nicaea. If there was only one God, how could Jesus be divine? Did that mean that there were two gods? And was there a third: What was the “ holy spirit,” which had been dealt with so perfunctorily in Athanasius’s creed? In the New Testament this Jewish term had referred to the human experience of the power and presence of the divine, which could never measure up to the divine reality itself. The Trinity was an attempt to translate this Jewish insight into a Hellenistic idiom. God, the Cappadocians explained, had one divine, inaccessible essence ( ousia ) that was totally beyond the reach of the human mind, but it had been made known to us by three manifestations ( hypostases ): the Father (source of being), the Logos (in the man Jesus), and the Spirit that we encounter within ourselves. Each “person” (from the Latin persona, meaning “mask”) of the Trinity was merely a partial glimpse of the divine ousia that we could never comprehend. The Cappadocians introduced converts to the Trinity in a meditation, which reminded them that the divine could never be encapsulated in a dogmatic formula. Constantly repeated, this meditation taught Christians that there was a kenosis at the heart of the Trinity, because the Father ceaselessly emptied itself, transmitting everything to the Logos. Once that Word had been spoken, the Father no longer had an “I” but remained forever silent and unknowable. The Logos likewise had no self of its own but was simply the “Thou” of the Father, while the Spirit was the “We” of Father and Son. 66 The Trinity expressed the paedeia’s values of restraint, deference, and self-abnegation, with which the more aristocratic bishops countered the current Christian stridency. Other bishops, alas, were all too ready to embrace it. Constantine had given the bishops new authority for the exercise of imperial power, and some, especially those of humble birth, strove for the episcopate as pugnaciously as politicians compete for parliamentary seats today.

• From Wild (2012)

  Afterwards, we walked back to our camp and stood around in a circle near our tents talking half drunk in the dark until it started to rain again and we had no choice but to disperse and say goodnight. When I got into my tent, I saw a puddle had formed at the far end. By morning it was a small lake; my sleeping bag was soaked. I shook it out and looked around the campsite for a place to drape it, but it was useless. It would only get wetter as the rain continued to pour down. I carried it with me when the Three Young Bucks and I walked to the store, holding it near the woodstove as we drank our coffee. “So we came up with a trail name for you,” said Josh. “What is it?” I asked reluctantly from behind the scrim of my drenched blue sleeping bag, as if it could protect me from whatever they might say. “The Queen of the PCT,” said Richie. “Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,” added Rick. “They never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact.” I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed. All the time that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman alone—the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon—I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another. Aside from the creepy experience with the sandy-haired guy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn. As if on cue, the old man leaned over the cash register. “Young lady, I wanted to tell you that if you want to stay another night and dry out, we’d let you have one of these cabins for next to nothing.” I turned to the Three Young Bucks with a question in my eyes. Within fifteen minutes, we’d moved into our cabin, hanging our sopped sleeping bags over the dusty rafters. The cabin was one wood-paneled room taken up almost entirely by two double beds that sat on antediluvian metal frames that squeaked if you so much as leaned on the bed. Once we’d settled in, I walked back to the store in the rain to buy snacks. When I stepped inside, Lisa was standing there by the woodstove. Lisa, who lived in Portland. Lisa, who’d been mailing my boxes all summer long. Lisa, whom I’d be moving in with in a week.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Over the next few days Marian took her early-morning shower and then opened the window, hooked up the shower-hose arrangement, and turned on the taps to water her tulips. She used only the fine pulse-mist settings, treating her plants as she would want to be treated herself. The tulips responded with enthusiasm—after a week her beds were popping with color. They knew the difference between water from a shower, meant for human use, and water from a crude leaky outdoor faucet. She sat on an aluminum chair with the sun on her legs, reading The Machine in the Garden. Every so often she glanced up at her tulips. She felt happy. She had planned this to happen and it had happened: she had delayed gratification and now she was getting the payoff. Young Kevin should see what they had done together, she thought, but when she called, Kevin’s sour mother told her that he was at practice. Just as well, just as well, she thought. She began to give some consideration to her drawerful of dildae. But she didn’t need any of that; no, she’d moved beyond that. Just then Kevin’s little gray cat with white paws showed up on her lawn, making untoward noises and acting oddly. Quite recently it, she, had been a kitten. Now she was clearly in heat, probably for the first time—and very irresponsible it was of Kevin or Kevin’s mother not to have had her fixed! She crawled along with her forepaws very low on the ground, making low desperate mezzo-mewings, her tail jerking back, her little narrow feline hips flaunting and twitching in the air, her rear paws working with quick tiptoe steps. Marian could see her gray-furred opening; wetness gleamed from within. She went over and pressed her finger lightly against the cat’s tiny slit; gratefully, the cat returned the pressure and tiptoed ardently in place. This was a cat in the grip of a new idea. Wiping her finger on the grass, Marian found that she had gotten hot looking at this creature’s fluttery haunchings. There was a purity and seriousness to the cat’s simple wish to be fucked immediately that Marian found refreshing. The cat didn’t want love—it wanted cat-cock.

• From Wild (2012)

  I hoisted Monster onto my back and ambled through the weeds down into the ditch and then up again, into the woods, which somehow felt like home to me, like the world that was mine in a way that the world of roads and towns and cars was no longer. I walked until I found a good spot in the shade. Then I sat down in the dirt and cracked the beer open. I didn’t like beer—in fact, that Budweiser was the first whole beer I’d ever drunk in my life—but it tasted good to me, like beer tastes, I imagine, to those who love it: cold and sharp and crisp and right. While I drank it I explored the contents of the plastic grocery bag. I took everything out and laid each item before me on the ground: a pack of peppermint gum, three individually wrapped wet wipes, a paper packet containing two aspirin, six butterscotch candies in translucent gold wrappers, a book of matches that said Thank You Steinbeck Drug, a Slim Jim sausage sealed in its plastic vacuum world, a single cigarette in a cylindrical faux-glass case, a disposable razor, and a short, fat can of baked beans. I ate the Slim Jim first, washing it down with the last of my Budweiser, and then the butterscotch candies, all six of them, one after the other, and then—still hungry, always hungry—turned my attention to the can of baked beans. I pried it open in tiny increments with the impossible can-opening device on my Swiss army knife, and then, too lazy to rummage through my pack for my spoon, I scooped them out with the knife itself and ate them—hobo-style—from the blade. I returned to the road feeling slightly hazy from the beer, chewing two pieces of the peppermint gum to sober up, while cheerfully stabbing my thumb at every vehicle that passed. After a few minutes, an old white Maverick pulled over. A woman sat in the driver’s seat with a man beside her and another man and a dog in the back seat. “Where you headed?” she asked. “Old Station,” I said. “Or at least the junction of 36 and 44.” “That’s on our way,” she said, and got out of the car, came around the back, and opened the trunk for me. She looked to be about forty. Her hair was frizzy and bleached blonde, her face puffy and pocked with old acne scars. She wore cutoffs and gold earrings in the shape of butterflies and a grayish halter top that seemed to have been made with the strings of a mop. “That’s quite a pack you got there, kiddo,” she said, and laughed raucously.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  3. The Apostolical Constitutions, the most complete and important Church Manual. It is, in form, a literary fiction, professing to be a bequest of all the apostles, handed down through the Roman bishop Clement, or dictated to him. It begins with the words: "The apostles and elders, to all who among the nations have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with you, and peace." It contains, in eight books, a collection of moral exhortations, church laws and usages, and liturgical formularies which had gradually arisen in the various churches from the close of the first century, the time of the Roman Clement, downward, particularly in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, partly on the authority of apostolic practice. These were at first orally transmitted; then committed to writing in different versions, like the creeds; and finally brought, by some unknown hand, into their present form. The first six books, which have a strongly Jewish-Christian tone, were composed, with the exception of some later interpolations, at the end of the third century, in Syria. The seventh book is an expansion of the Didache of the Twelve Apostles. The eighth book contains a liturgy, and, in an appendix, the apostolical canons. The collection of the three parts into one whole may be the work of the compiler of the eighth book. It is no doubt of Eastern authorship, for the church of Rome nowhere occupies a position of priority or supremacy.265 The design was, to set forth the ecclesiastical life for laity and clergy, and to establish the episcopal theocracy. These constitutions were more used and consulted in the East than any work of the fathers, and were taken as the rule in matters of discipline, like the Holy Scriptures in matters of doctrine. Still the collection, as such, did not rise to formal legal authority, and the second Trullan council of 692 (known as quinisextum), rejected it for its heretical interpolations, while the same council acknowledged the Apostolical Canons.266

• From Wild (2012)

  There are all the grand things he wanted to be, a longing so naked and sorry I sensed it and grieved it even as a young child. There is him singing that Charlie Rich song that goes “Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and saying it was about me and my sister and our mother, that we were the most beautiful girls in the world. Oprah’s note: I love words, and there are some sentences that I love spoon-feeding to myself. This is one of those spoon-fed sentences. “A longing so naked and sorry”: even if you’ve never had that kind of longing, it so accurately describes it that you know what that feels like. Click here to return to the text. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me. Oprah’s note: That may be my favorite line in the whole book. First of all, it’s so beautifully constructed, and it captures what this journey was all about. She started out looking to find herself—looking for clarity—and that’s exactly what happens. The essence of the book is held right there in that sentence. It means that every step was worth it. It means all the skepticism of whether this hike is the right thing or not the right thing—it all gets resolved in that sentence. Click here to return to the text. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with her hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller. I took a drag and blew the smoke from my mouth remembering how I had felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world that morning after Jimmy Carter drove away. Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay. Oprah’s note: I liked the self-realization that’s coming here: that if you can’t be alone with yourself and be happy, then you can never be happy. All her life she’s been running from herself, and finally she has this moment where she sees that she’s alone—and that’s really okay. Click here to return to the text. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one. Oprah’s note:

• From Bold Move

  Turning Values into ActionTo transform your bold vision into a clear plan, we will rely on one of the most revolutionary frameworks I have seen in recent years: Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. Simon is a world-renowned public speaker, author, and unshakable optimist.21 In his book, Start with Why : How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action ,22 he describes the utility behind the why, how, and what that fuel actions using an image of concentric circles. Although the book focuses heavily on examples from the business world, he has written extensively about the application of the Golden Circle to many diverse domains in life. I use it to structure a lot of my work, life, and ambitions. In fact: I actually used it to structure this book! I start with the why for the entire book (because avoidance sucks!), then each part (e.g., Shift , Approach , Align ) dives down into how we avoid in that domain (3 Rs of avoidance: react, retreat, remain) and then what to do about it (boom: science!). So it might not surprise you that I use the same framework to help my clients create a plan to achieve their bold vision. I’ve found that it’s most helpful to consider four things when creating the steps of a bold plan: 1) Is it aligned (the why)? 2) Is it specific (the what)? 3) Is it doable (the how)? and 4) Is it scheduled (the when)? Asking these questions will help you arrive at a workable step. Workable steps will help you navigate life with a plan that is aligned with your values so you don’t stray (like I did) by focusing only on the outcome (goals) and not on why you are doing this in the first place (value). Ricardo’s and Stephanie’s Values in ActionLet’s revisit the stories of Ricardo and Stephanie to get a feel for what bold plans look like. Ricardo’s plans were challenging to work on because they involved his children, which meant that, whatever step he outlined he would need to clear with his wife in the midst of an uncomfortable divorce process. Ricardo explained to me that he felt this would be impossible given how challenging their relationship had been. The reality is, Ricardo was actually avoiding a bit here: as we discussed things further, it became clear that there were in fact times when he was with his children and could focus on his connection (aligned ). While arranging for these moments might be challenging, it was not some insurmountable impossibility. To achieve this, we worked on exactly what he could do within the context of what he could control (doable ), and he found a great solution. He decided that he would spend forty-five minutes without his work cell phone when he was with his children (specific ) twice a week at dinner time (scheduled ). Specifically, Tuesdays and Thursdays: this was literally in his calendar (laser alignment ).

• From Wild (2012)

  But he was wrong. There were no buses that went all the way to Sierra City, we learned. We’d have to catch a bus that evening and ride seven hours to Reno, Nevada, then take another one for an hour to Truckee, California. From there we’d have no option but to hitchhike the final forty-five miles to Sierra City. We bought two one-way tickets and an armful of snacks and sat on the warm pavement at the edge of the convenience store parking lot waiting for the bus to come. We polished off whole bags of chips and cans of soda while talking. We ran through the Pacific Crest Trail as a conversational topic, through backpacking gear and the record snowpack one more time, through the “ultralight” theories and practices of Ray Jardine and of his followers—who may or may not have misinterpreted the spirit behind those theories and practices—and finally arrived at ourselves. I asked him about his job and life in Tacoma. He had no pets and no kids and a girlfriend he’d been dating a year. She was an avid backpacker too. His life, it was clear, was an ordered and considered thing. It seemed both boring and astounding to me. I didn’t know what mine seemed like to him. The bus to Reno was nearly empty when we got on at last. I followed Greg to the middle, where we took pairs of seats directly opposite each other across the aisle. “I’m going to get some sleep,” he said once the bus lurched onto the highway.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  hands to yourself!” They also looked for other instances of desired behavior from Joey, as well as from the other children, and gave attention to those behaviors too. As this strategy became part of normal classroom protocol, all the children who had been acting out, including Joey, began doing it less. This strategy improved the entire atmosphere of the classrooms, helping to create a culture of inclusion where everyone tended to progress, regardless how far along they were. Positive Focus Conventional wisdom is that we should be punished for doing wrong so that we will want to do right instead. In every situation we encounter we tend to keep our focus on noticing what we are doing wrong. While negative reinforcement does help us learn when it comes from our environment, for instance learning not to grab a rose by the stem, it is rarely effective when it comes from other people or from ourselves. As I have seen over and over in my professional and personal practices, we learn best when we are consistently rewarded for what we are doing right. This is true for learning anything new and difficult. A pianist who is praised by her teacher for her focus and her expression—even when she misses notes—will ultimately make better music than an equally talented pianist who is praised only when she performs flawlessly. A basketball player who is praised by his coach for shooting with correct form—regardless of whether he hits the basket—is more likely to develop a good shot than a similar player who is praised only when his attempts are successful.

• From Bold Move

  Of course, I’m not promising you that learning this skill is the key to feeling amazing 100 percent of the time, but what I am promising you is that if you take the time to really Align your values and actions, the journey of your life will be far more rewarding than it would be otherwise. But before we wrap up this chapter, there is an important caveat: values can change across our lives. In fact, given that life is change, you should expect your values to shift throughout the days, weeks, months, and years of your life. As we evolve, situations change, and we can decide to prioritize other values. After all, our values are no more static than our lives are, and depending on what is going on at any given moment, we will have to realign what we are doing so that it matches up with our new true north. Think of it like values-driven compass maintenance. As I learned in my first yoga class back in 2000, everything is a journey, not a destination. With a good compass on hand, you are equipped for the journey. This journey can be rough at times, gorgeous at others, and sometimes just meh. But it is a journey worth traveling because you have a true north pointing you in the direction of fulfillment. And not just the cheap fulfillment from the material world. I’m talking about the satisfaction that accompanies you to bed and makes you excited to see what happens tomorrow. When the downpours of life occur, and you are jolted off course, don’t be discouraged: the compass is still there. I have never met someone who always stays dead straight on the course of their true north—that is just humanly impossible. To move boldly forward is to give yourself time to pause whenever you find yourself in the wilderness. When this occurs, identify your avoidance pattern and match it with a skill that overcomes it (slay that dragon!). If your thinking is what is setting you off course, it will be Shift to the rescue. If your reactivity is robbing the best of you, Approach through opposite action will recalibrate your journey. And when you’re doing what you have always done, following someone else’s GPS, it is time to Align with your values. As ex-Navy SEAL, author, and speaker Jocko Willink is fond of saying on his podcast: “When you get off the path, it’s alright. Just get back on the path.” There is no single solution that will work for everyone forever because these are skills designed to be matched to your current avoidance pattern. With practice, you will be able to catch your avoidance faster, match the solution skill, and act—but that takes practice! There is only one way to fail here, which is to not do anything.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.” “Oh, Mom,” was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else. At noon I went to the cafeteria in one of the nearby buildings and ate lunch. Afterwards, I walked through the parking lot to the Crater Lake Lodge and strolled through the elegantly rustic lobby with Monster on my back, pausing to peer into the dining room. There was a smattering of people sitting at tables, handsome groups holding glasses of chardonnay and pinot gris like pale yellow jewels. I went outside to the long porch that overlooked the lake, made my way along a line of grand rocking chairs, and found one that was set off by itself. I sat in it for the rest of the afternoon, staring at the lake. I still had 334 miles to hike before I reached the Bridge of the Gods, but something made me feel as if I’d arrived. Like that blue water was telling me something I’d walked all this way to know. This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began. 17 INTO A PRIMAL GEAROregon was a hopscotch in my mind. I skipped it, spun it, leapt it in my imagination all the way from Crater Lake to the Bridge of the Gods. Eighty-five miles to my next box at a place called Shelter Cove Resort. One hundred and forty-three miles beyond that to my final box at Olallie Lake. Then I’d be on the homestretch to the Columbia River: 106 miles to the town of Cascade Locks, with a stop for a holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-I’m-almost-there drink at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood at the midpoint of that final stretch. But that still added up to 334 miles to hike.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Roger Bacon had felt revulsion from the hairsplitting casuistries of the Schoolmen, and given expression to it before Eckart began his activity at Cologne. Scholasticism had trodden a beaten and dusty highway. The German mystics walked in secluded and shady pathways. For a catalogue of dogmatic maxims they substituted the quiet expressions of filial devotion and assurance. The speculative element is still prominent in Eckart, but it is not indulged for the sake of establishing doctrinal rectitude, but for the nurture of inward experience of God’s operations in the soul. Godliness with these men was not a system of careful definitions, it was a state of spiritual communion; not an elaborate construction of speculative thought, but a simple faith and walk with God. Not processes of logic but the insight of devotion was their guide.428 As Loofs has well said, German mysticism emphasized above all dogmas and all external works the necessity of the new birth.429 It also had its dangers. Socrates had urged men not to rest hopes upon the Delphian oracle, but to listen to the voice in their own bosoms. The mystics, in seeking to hear the voice of God speaking in their own hearts, ran peril of magnifying individualism to the disparagement of what was common to all and of mistaking states of the overwrought imagination for revelations from God.430 Although the German mystical writers have not been quoted in the acts of councils or by popes as have been the theologies of the Schoolmen, they represented, if we follow the testimonies of Luther and Melanchthon, an important stage in the religious development of the German people, and it is certainly most significant that the Reformation broke out on the soil where the mystics lived and wrought, and their piety took deep root. They have a perennial life for souls who, seeking devotional companionship, continue to go back to the leaders of that remarkable pietistic movement. The leading features of the mysticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may be summed up in the following propositions. 1. Its appeals were addressed to laymen as well as to clerics. 2. The mystics emphasized instruction and preaching, and, if we except Suso, withdrew the emphasis which had been laid upon the traditional ascetic regulations of the Church. They did not commend buffetings of the body. The distance between Peter Damiani and Tauler is world-wide. 3. They used the New Testament more than they used the Old Testament, and the words of Christ took the place of the Canticles in their interpretations of the mind of God. The German Theology quotes scarcely a single passage which is not found in the New Testament, and the Imitation of Christ opens with the quotation of words spoken by our Lord. Eckart and Tauler dwell upon passages of the New Testament, and Ruysbroeck evolves the fulness of his teaching from Matthew 25:6, "Behold the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him." 4.

• From 50 Shades Uncovered (2015)

  Agnes: I think it's nice that she refers to her inner goddess. I think all women should think of themselves in that way sexually and-- and in life. The terms that she used to describe her, uh, vagina. She described it as "my sex." And I just think, the writer had a world - of metaphors and terms to use. - Anything, anything. - You could've called it "my zebra crossing." - "My pineapple." You could have called it "my Elizabeth Taylor." - "My Elizabeth Taylor." - It could've been anything. "My mimsy." Anything. -"My sex." -"My sex." It's very interesting that these are very young people. The-- the Christian and the girl, they're in their twenties. So what happens to some women who maybe have been in long-term relationships with the same guy, they get to go back in their fantasies to a stage where maybe they were more sexual, and then that creates a very, very interesting feedback loop in the sense that they tap into their own sexuality and then they say, "Well, what can I do with it? "Maybe I need to go buy more lingerie. "Maybe I need to realize this fantasy that this book really provides." (music playing) Narrator: Historically, our relationship with explicit novels has been cyclical. The eighteenth century was a time of glamour and excess, when affairs were forgiven and mistresses were on show. (giggling) By the time Queen Victoria took to the throne in 1837, contemporary morals had shifted. The Queen was a young virgin, and the most celebrated women were no longer mistresses, but reformers and writers. The Victorians preferred to read about love, not sex. Up until the early 1950s, society could be described as a nation of prudes. People talk sex. Every paper talks about sex. It's all very common, very down-market, and very horrible. Narrator: And so remained the status quo until 1960 when Penguin won the right to publish D.H. Lawrence's explicit novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Francis: If you go back a century you've got "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which for that time was explicit and illicit. Kite: "Lady Chatterley's Lover," that was a really shocking book at the time. White: It certainly created a lot of publicity around the whole case in the early '60s. Hodson: We've got a long history of banning books because we're afraid of the sexual practices that they describe possibly spreading into respectable society. "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was actually prosecuted in this country and banned because of the sexual violence in it. Mellors, the gamekeeper, is very angry with Lady Constance because she wants to be a feminist in bed. Two books that people kind of always refer to when they're thinking about historical "dirty books," they are the "Story of O" and the Marquis de Sade. I think Enid Blyton in her own way was rockin' it for a while, but it wasn't close enough to porn.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was the Thames, I knew, which widened at its estuary to form the kind, clear, oyster-bearing sea I had grown up on. It gave me an odd little thrill, as I stood gazing at the pleasure-boats beneath Lambeth Bridge, to know that I had journeyed against the current - had made the trip from palpitating metropolis to mild, uncomplicated Whitstable in reverse. When I saw barges bringing fish from Kent I only smiled - it never made me homesick. And when the barge-men turned, to make the journey back along the river, I did not envy them at all. And while we strolled and gazed and grew ever more sisterly and content, the year drew to a close; we continued to labour over the act, and Kitty herself became something of a success. Now, every contract that Walter found her was longer and more generous than the last; soon she was over-booked, and turning offers down. Now she had admirers - gentlemen, who sent her flowers and dinner invitations (which - to my secret relief - she only laughed over and put aside); boys, who asked for her picture; girls, who gathered at the stage door to tell her how handsome she was - girls I hardly knew whether to pity, patronise or fear, so closely did they resemble me, so easily might they have had my role, I theirs.And yet, with all this, she did not become what she longed to be, what Walter had promised her she would be: a star. The halls she worked remained the suburban ones, and the better class of East End ones (and once or twice the not-so-nice ones - Foresters, and the Sebright, where the crowd threw boots and trotter-bones at the acts they didn’t like). Her name never rose much or grew larger on the music-hall notices; her songs were never hummed or whistled about the streets. The problem, Walter said, lay not with Kitty herself but with the nature of her act. She had too many rivals; male impersonation - once as specialised as plate-spinning - had suddenly, inexplicably, become a cruelly overworked routine.‘Why does every young lady who wants to do her bit of business on the stage these days want to do it in trousers?’ he asked us, exasperated, when yet another male impersonator made her debut on the London circuit. ‘Why does every perfectly respectable comedienne and serio suddenly want to change her act - to pull a pair of bell-bottoms on, and dance the hornpipe? Kitty, you were born to play the boy, any fool can see it; were you an actress on the legitimate stage you would be Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia.