Sublime

One of the most important discoveries I made in the process of being ill is that solitary striving, my American habit of self-focus, was in some fundamental way a degradation of the most powerful aspects of our lives, which now seem to me to be our interconnectedness and need of others.

When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come. Your movements are marked not

Being is lost in the pressure of activity (and accumulation).

I was alone because of the ways that we have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than community, must do all the healing.

The writer George Saunders, speaking of his own near-death experience, said, “For three or four days after that, it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, if you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”