struggle

Self-struggle is spiritual.

But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse _ I mean obviously Rothko.

There are things you should never give up on like your convictions and ambitions but most importantly_you should never give up on you. Keep making those sacrifices, keep running that race, keep advancing beyond your struggles to your eventual goal. You will deeply value your triumphs, if they__e not handed to you. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth having or attaining without labor and toil. So when you__e in your darkest hour and the road seems endless, no matter what, never ever give up on you_because only you will see you through. ~Jason Versey

So what do I do? What do we do? How do we move forward when we are tired and afraid? What do we do when the voice in our head is yelling that WE ARE NEVER GONNA MAKE IT? How do we drag ourselves through the muck when our brain is telling us youaredumbandyouwillneverfinishandnoonecaresanditistimeyoustop? Well, the first thing we do is take our brain out and put it in a drawer. Stick it somewhere and let it tantrum until it wears itself out. You may still hear the brain and all the shitty things it is saying to you, but it will be muffled, and just the fact that it is not in your head anymore will make things seem clearer. And then you just do it. You just dig in and write it. You use your body. you lean over the computer and stretch and pace. You write and then cook something and write some more. you put your hand on your heart and feel it beating and decide if what you wrote feels true. You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing. That is what I know. Writing the book is about writing the book. So here we go, you and me. Because what else are we going to do? Say no? Say no to an opportunity that may be slightly out of our comfort zone? Quiet our voice because we are worried it is not perfect? I believe great people do things before they are ready. This is America and I am allowed to have healthy self-esteem. This book comes straight from my feisty and freckled fingers. Know it was a battle. Blood was shed. A war raged between my jokey and protective brain and my squishy and tender heart. I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let's peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. This is the honest way I want to live and love and write.

I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there's nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.

Struggle for Your Goals, because its too much better than Struggling for Your Life.

Struggle only when if its absolute necessity, if you will struggle on every step you can never reach up to the goal.

The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we're making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives.

But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest.

Sometimes you want something so badly, you get caught up; you lose yourself in that hunger. But then, once it is gone, you have a chance to reassess -to decide what it is you're truly after. Half of the time, it's not what you originally thought it would be.

I sat and reflected on the situation I had facedI needed answers to the questions I still, didnt have the courage to ask...But I need to know,How was this to be apart of my destiny?

Thousands of hopeful days came to naught before this one. This was a golden day. Never give up.

The struggle is beautiful.

I find pain, rather beautiful. It has a chaotic way of shaking up Everything we once ignored, To empower us to move past Anything that doesn't serve the best of us anymore.

She didn't struggle and so she didn't grow

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter__nd pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.

After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.