Finding Their Voices

“One thing that I think is pretty universal for stutterers is that since we have to deal with this every single day of our lives, I think that everyone will agree that it really teaches compassion.”

~ Philip, from “Finding Their Voices,” by Mo Rocca, CBS Sunday Morning, Jan. 30, 2011

See also: The Way You Are

Misery is Easy

…happiness you have to work at.

Killing Time

Simple
by Rae Armantrout, from Versed

for Aaron Korkegian

Complex systems can arise
from simple rules.
It's not
that we want to survive,
it's that we've been drugged
and made to act
as if we do
while all the while
the sea breaks
and rolls, painlessly, under.
If we're not copying it,
we're lonely.
Is this the knowledge
that demands to be
passed down?
Time is made from swatches
of heaven and hell.
If we're not killing it,
we're hungry.

A Disappointment with a Mask

“Expectations are very dangerous things. The more of them we have, the more fixated we are on them, the more miserable we will probably be. Every expectation is a disappointment with a mask on it. Even when it happens that we get exactly what we expected, it’s never exactly what we expected because the anticipation is never the reality. And even if it feels like it, then the next minute it’s gone anyway. So this is not going to work out. It’s clear.

We need to have some drive, some desire, some feeling that it’s necessary to go forward and some energy to propel us forward, but to expect some particular result is to construct a gigantic roadblock right in the middle of where you’re trying to go.”

~ Norman Fischer, from a talk on Art Making

Life Changes

Excerpt from We Are Not Temples by Matthew Dickman, from All-American Poem:

My friend, a Buddhist, tells me
that life is constantly changing
and that my struggle against it
is the cause of all my suffering. That and wanting
what I do not have, being less than excited about what I do,
and the shaky delusions
of an invented reality in which I probably live
most of my days. She’s right.
Life changes. The sacred becomes, after many years, secular
and then turns back around as if it has forgotten its keys,
becoming sacred all over again.

To Blur the Line a Bit

“We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do. Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools of the Mind does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

~ Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, quoted in “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” by Paul Tough, New York Times (September 25, 2009).

I Would Be One of Many

Samar Jarrah of Port Charlotte, Florida describes the benefits she sees in experiencing Ramadan in the United States:

I just got back from Jordan…and my family was telling me, Why can’t you just stay a bit longer and spend a week of Ramadan in Jordan or in Egypt? And I said, You will never understand this, but the best Ramadan I ever spend in my life is always in America. Because I feel sometimes that I am the only person fasting, it’s more strenuous, I feel like every day is a jihad for me – a struggle to maintain my faith, to maintain my fast despite the amazing food around me and the smells. If I go shopping or if I go to the mall, there is food everywhere. Everybody’s eating except myself and this brings me amazing strength. And I wake up very early in the morning. I can be lecturing. I can be driving to my class – a hundred miles each way. I can be feeding the homeless. I can be doing amazing stuff that I would not be doing if I were living in a Muslim country, because the whole country would be fasting and I would be one of many.

[More…]

Listen to more voices at Revealing Ramadan from Speaking of Faith.