You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the idea that what we often seek as an escape may actually be a deeper desire for connection and understanding.
Cheryl Strayed's quote speaks to the internal struggle of longing for change or escape, yet realizing that the true desire is not to run away but to delve deeper into oneself and one's experiences. It highlights the paradox of human yearning, where the pursuit of freedom can sometimes obscure the more profound need for growth and understanding within our own lives. Strayed invites us to reconsider the true depths of our desires and the importance of introspection.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a personal development workshop to inspire deeper reflection.
More from Cheryl Strayed
All quotes βThe obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.
There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.
Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.
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Tawwakul is not an act of the limbs-it is an act of the heart. And so while the limbs are striving hard, the heart is completely reliant on Allah. This means whatever the outcome of the limbs' striving, the heart will be completely satisfied, knowing that it is the flawless decision of Allah. But in order to reach this level, one must hold on to hope, strive with the limbs, and let go with the heart.
God save the Queen and a fascist regime β¦ a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire