I found out the hard way, receiving awards and impressive remarks often becomes an addiction, an enslavement of the mind. The more you do, the more you feel the need to do, to stay ahead of others and your past self. And when you're not doing, you feel worthless to the world. It's one thing to be build a resume to get into college or to get a good job, it's another thing to believe that resume gives you self-worth. We live as social profiles unable or unwilling to admit that Saturday night we did nothing. Looking back, tennis was trying to free me from those future expectations. [Excerpt]
There’s something about the quiet stillness on Sunday nights that forces us to look within. If we are wanting to reach a higher potential, we must make room for better than the present. We must sink into the uncomfortable stillness and let it open up doors. It’s easy to get too busy to ever feel this stillness, to ever feel the discomfort that comes from wrestling with our dreams, and that’s exactly why we must. Living in the middle of New York City, I’ll attest to the fact that the world’s noise is unending. Too often we give up on hearing our inner voice and follow everyone else’s instead. [Excerpt]
We feared getting the same diseases, sometimes talking ourselves into panic attacks, not realizing that we already had the worst of them. The disease that is fear. Now pictured as the fear of growing older, or the lesser fear of dying. The fear of being alone. The fear that decisions that we made yesterday, or last week, or last year have somehow led us to a place that isn’t quite what we expected. That they now haunt us as we’re running out of time. [Excerpt]
Three-hundred and sixty five days - and I’d like to underline each one of them. One year in many ways feels like one month, feels like a decade. It’s been nothing like the expectations I had laid out in my head, but much more. Coming home makes for good reflecting time away from the city. The past one year has been a rollercoaster of courage, fear, faith, loneliness, meditation, gratitude, joy and pure freedom embedded within new experiences, friends, job, home, and a new mindset. [Excerpt]
There’s a tree outside my apartment window in New York. I have no idea what kind of tree it is, but it looks like a million tiny ferns crawled up onto its branches and planted themselves into its bark. A million tiny ferns that were now bright yellow, as if they were protesting the summer sunshine to return to our street. [Excerpt]
It's up here, between bushes and bricks, that I've been able to see more clearly during this somewhat morning ritual of mine. Runners fly past, and I can tell. Some of them are running towards something - they have this vision in their eyes, hopes for something up ahead. Others, I can tell, are running from something. From the person they are, or were. I guess that's really how we all ended up here. One or the other. [Excerpt]
Fall. Everyone's favorite culture. Even the textiles seem softer and smoother and more gentle on the skin. As if the air itself tastes like grace. Cathartic clouds -- turquoise sheets draped behind gray piles of cumulonimbus lace. A cool breeze blowing through, carrying us back to high school football games and bonfires on beaches where we've never been, but we always imagined that we did. The feeling of a thousand memories inhaled in one whiff, the taste of sweet nostalgia and college meal plans. [Excerpt]
