Joseph Parent and Nancy Parent

An overactive thinking mind is a common obstacle to mindfulness. 

Rather than struggling, make the cascade of thoughts the object of your attention, watching the twists and turns they take. 

Gradually, they will seem more m and manageable, like white-water rapid slowing and merging into a gently flowing river. 

—A Walk in the Wood: Meditations on Mindfulness with a Bear Named Pooh

Kathleen Smith

Don’t worry about feeling hopeful. When we’re feeling anxious about the future, we tend to think we need to muster a sense of hope before we shift into problem-solving mode. In other words, we focus on fixing the emotions first.

But that’s the wrong order of operations. Problem-solving isn’t a result of hope. It’s what calms us down and instills hope in us. Engaging our frontal lobe, the part of the brain that defines goals and breaks them into manageable steps, can shift us out of anxiety and into a more thoughtful state of being. What once seemed like certain doom can start to look like a complex but manageable challenge.

So when you feel like the world is crumbling around you, don’t worry about turning yourself into a calm optimist. Instead, try picking up a small piece of the problem and learning more about it. When you begin to think about the facts, without shutting or attacking others, you begin to find a way to manage the fear and face the challenge. And paradoxically, when you begin to think about yourself instead of everyone else, you become a little less selfish and more of a resource to those around you.

https://forge.medium.com/you-dont-have-to-feel-hopeful-96f04a924f5b

-Kathleen Smith is a licensed therapist and the author of Everything Isn't Terrible (December 2019)

Brené Brown

What I've learned to do is reserve seats for them [the critics]...And simply say, when I'm trying to do something new and hard and original and creative, "I see you, I hear you, but I'm going to show up and do this anyway. I've got a seat for you and you're welcome to come, but I'm not interested in your feedback." 

Brené Brown

Speaking about the Theodore Roosevelt  "Man in the Arena" quote: 

It's not about winning, it's not about losing, it's about showing up and being seen. 

If you're going to show up and be seen, there is only one guarantee: you will get your ass kicked. If courage is a value that you hold, this is a consequence. You can't avoid it. 

If you're not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I'm not interested in your feedback. If you have constructive information to give me, let's do it. But if you're in the cheap seats not putting yourself on the line, just talking about how I can do it better, I'm in no way interested in your feedback. 

Theodore Roosevelt

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.  

p. 7 of 35, commonly known as the "Man in the Arena" section of his "Citizenship in a Republic" speech given at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910.

Spencer Tweedy

The idea that there are creative people and non-creative people is exclusionary and bonkers. What seems truer is that there are varying levels of access to resources, varying starting abilities, and varying experiences of encouragement that affect whether or not someone puts time into art. 

https://pitchfork.com/features/family-matters/lots-of-people-wish-jeff-tweedy-were-their-dad-for-spencer-tweedy-its-a-reality/

Jeff Tweedy

I think generation gaps are a bill of goods that is sold as marketing. It's a little bit of a divide and conquer method from corporate America to separate the demographics and target people with that notion. It gives people my age permission to dismiss younger people, which is awful, and it gives younger people some sort of concept that the world has changed in a way that makes someone like me invalid. 

But in more cases than not, there is a lot of common ground—everybody that's my age was once Spencer's age. And the internet has made time much more circular. When I was a kid, it really was unheard of to like your parents. If you were into punk rock and stuff like that, your parents were the closest target you had to combat the powers that be. 

https://pitchfork.com/features/family-matters/lots-of-people-wish-jeff-tweedy-were-their-dad-for-spencer-tweedy-its-a-reality/

Jeff Tweedy

A lot of really tragic humans have made incredible, beautiful art, and the art has always been much more difficult to talk about than the personalities behind it. As a culture, we started to mix up terrible personality traits with artistic worth. That always bothered me. Even though I became a drug addict, I hated that drugs were associated with rock music. It made me uncomfortable, to be honest. I'm not going to tell anybody what to do, but I had an intuitive sense that there are a lot of people that can't handle drugs, like myself. 

But because it's so hard for writers to make any sense of art in a way that the art isn't already making sense of itself, we focused on artists for a long time. Then it became a lifestyle and a culture that was promoted out of lack of imagination and built on this idea that the personality is the art, but it's not. It shouldn't be revolutionary that the art should be its own incredibly freeing thing. And if you're going to focus on the artist, there's nothing wrong with them sharing their insights into how to live in a way that's fulfilling and not just promoting some sort of thoughtless, broken personality trait. I sound like a total square and I don't give a fuck, because I think it's revolutionary to be honest about that.

I like the idea that art and creativity is accessible to everybody—it doesn't have a criteria for how broken or addicted or depraved you are, it's the best part of you. And as you can indulge it and have it enhance your life in a positive way, isn't that preferred? It might be harder to talk about, but wouldn't that be the preferred outcome—that you have more people who are less broken and who are able to guide some other people through their brokenness to something more whole. I feel like that's a great way to live. 

https://pitchfork.com/features/family-matters/lots-of-people-wish-jeff-tweedy-were-their-dad-for-spencer-tweedy-its-a-reality