Hoping a situation will change keeps you at a distance from your true feelings-sadness, anger, fear. Each of these feelings is best appreciated up close. Feel them deeply, and they will cease to bother you. Hope they'll go away, and they'll bother you all day.
Interpretation
Avoiding true feelings only prolongs distress; embracing emotions leads to healing.
This quote emphasizes the importance of confronting and feeling our emotions—such as sadness, anger, and fear—rather than hoping they will disappear on their own. The author argues that by fully experiencing these feelings, we can reduce their hold on us, leading to greater emotional well-being and resilience.
In practice
In a therapy session focusing on emotional release.
You never know when it is going to happen, when you will experience a moment that dramatically transforms your life. When you look back, often years later, you may see how a brief conversation or an insight you read somewhere, changed the entire course of your life.
Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed out inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.
People say, on the raft, you must have hallucinated. Baloney. We were sharper after 47 days than the day we started because our minds were empty of all the war and contamination; we had clean minds to fill with good thoughts. Every day we'd exercise our minds.
Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong.
In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.
It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, 'John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?'
If you love money and you want to be creative, you cannot become creative. The very ambition for money is going to destroy your creativity. If you want fame, then forget about creativity. Fame comes easier if you are destructive.
The true definition of madness is repeating the same action, over and over, hoping for a different result.
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