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According to Buddhist principles, in seeing ourselves, our emotions and thoughts, exactly as they are right now, and in not trying to make them go away or improve or change them, we have the opportunity to befriend ourselves and cease suffering. This no-escape witnessing, when we can do it with “precision and gentleness” (the gentleness is key), ho

John Stilgoe, a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the author of several books, including Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. Stilgoe believes the power of acute observation is one of nature’s most useful learning tools.

I believe that welcoming subjectivity into our lives opens the doors to seeing the unseen. Subjectivity offers us a way of seeing from different angles and myriad perspectives. It fuels an examination of a nascent point of view and helps bring clarity to the amorphous, fuzzy concepts and questions we grapple with. It is only when we experiment and

our imaginations allow us to experience the things we hear and see as if they were our own, which leads to powerful connections.

Recovering memory is more like picking up shards of your past. But even that can be beautiful, because they can be reassembled as a mosaic, which, as the author Terry Tempest Williams says, is “a conversation between what is broken.”

Some of the earliest practices of reading were not of letters, words, or books, but of stars, entrails, and birds, and these practices had a significant impact on the way literature was read and understood in the ancient world.

if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to.

(Perhaps the enduring impulse that drives a life of scholarship is like the enduring impulse that drives a life of art: not asking a question that you don’t know the answer to, but answering a question that you never figure out how to formulate.)