More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
Interpretation
We often find ourselves overwhelmed by life's demands, like doctors who must care for others while neglecting our own needs.
Pico Iyer uses the metaphor of emergency-room physicians to illustrate how modern life forces individuals to be constantly available and responsible for their own well-being amidst chaos. This quote reflects the struggle of balancing personal health and managing the clutter of daily responsibilities and distractions that can prevent us from caring for ourselves properly.
In practice
During a mental health seminar, a speaker might quote this to emphasize the importance of prioritizing self-care.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.
People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it.
Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb.
A free and truly independent press - fiercely independent when necessary - is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy.
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
War is the continuation of politics by other means.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.