100. To Hold Together And To Split Apart 🫂
Friends,
Welcome to #100 of The Dossier!
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and reads my posts each week. This started out as a creative outlet for me during the first days of the COVID pandemic and here we are - 100 WEEKS LATER! It’s wonderful to have you here 💛
I’m changing things up a little going forward to honour the collective loss in attention span that we seem to be suffering from as humans right now. I’ll be keeping the email shorter but the overall theme will continue - I’ll be sharing three things (instead of five!) I’ve come across during the week that you may find interesting and/or meaningful.
Let me know how you feel about the new format by commenting on the post or hit reply to this email.
1. A Poem 🤲🏼
CLEAVE — David Whyte
“We were born saying goodbye
to what we love,
we were born
in a beautiful reluctance
to be here,
not quite ready
to breathe in this new world,
we are here and we are almost not,
we are present while still not
wanting to admit we have arrived.”
2. An Eschatological Laundry list: By Sheldon Kopp (1974) 🧺
This is it !
There are no hidden meanings.
You can’t get from there to here, and besides there’s no place else to go.
We are already dying, and we will be dead for a long time.
Nothing lasts.
There is no way of getting all you want.
You can’t have anything unless you let go of it.
You only get to keep what you give away.
There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.
The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune.
You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless.
It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.
You don’t really control anything.
You can’t make anyone love you.
No one is any stronger or any weaker than anyone else.
Everyone is in his own way, vulnerable.
There are no great men.
If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.
Everyone lies, cheats, pretends ( yes, you too, and most certainly I myself).
All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation.
All of you is worth something, if only you will own it.
Progress is an illusion.
Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new problems.
Yet it us necessary to keep on struggling towards solution.
Childhood is a nightmare.
But it is s very hard to be an on-your-own, take-care- of -yourself-cause -there- is-no-one -else-to do-it-for-you-grown -up.
Each of us is utimately alone.
The most important things, each man must do for himself.
Love is not enough, but it sure helps.
We have only ourselves, and one another. That may ot be much, but thats all there is.
How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it.
We must live with the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.
All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficent data.
Yet we are responsible for everything we do.
No excuses will be accepted.
You can run, but you can’t hide.
It is most important to run out of scapegoats.
We must learn the power of living with our helplessness.
The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.
All of the significant battles are waged within the self.
You are free to do whatever you want. You need only face the consequences.
What do you know…for sure…anyway ?
Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again.
3. A Room Of Ones Own 🏝️
Where I would like to read. (new fave instagram)
See you next weekend.
Happy 100! 🥳