“The Patterns of Our Lives Reveal Us. Our Habits Measure Us.”

"Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

That monster, Custom, who all sense doth eat

Of habits evil, is angel yet in this,

That to the use of actions fair and good

He likewise gives a frock or livery,

That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence; the next more easy:

For use can almost change the stamp of nature,

And master even the devil, or throw him out,

With wondrous potency."

Hamlet 

Act: III Sc: IV

To keep repeating a baleful pattern 

without recognising that we are caught in its loop 

is one of life’s greatest tragedies; 

To recognise it 

but feel helpless in breaking it is one of our greatest trials; 

to transcend the fear of uncertainty, 

which undergirds all such patterns of belief and behaviour, 

is a supreme triumph.

Maria Popova ~ Brainpickings

"And so we might say: 

The first act of creation is not a mark, 

it is the nullification of the infinity that exists before the first mark. 

To make a mark is to remember that we are finite. 

It is to break, or violate, the illusion 

that we are nature that goes around in a loop forever. 

But it is also a confirmation of our knowledge and freedom, 

which is all we have in this world."

Nicole Krauss

"O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter.
O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!"

Hamlet

"I was struck, too, by how much of Hamlet 

is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: 

the difference between being and seeming, 

the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, 

the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. 

(If you don’t seem sad, people worry; 

but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

Meghan O'Rourke

"The Long Goodbye" 

Love and Grief