Choisir

Choisir (verb, Fr.): Choose

"... Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life --the life you author from scratch on your own, begins.

- How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
- Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
- Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
- Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
- Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
- Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?
- Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
- Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
- When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
- Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
- Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story...."

- Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos' commencement speech to Princeton's Class of 2010 on May 30, 2010.

Jolie

Jolie (adj., Fr.): Pretty

"Happy girls are the prettiest girls."
- Audrey Hepburn

Promises

"Promises are like babies, easy to make but hard to deliver."
- Unknown

"Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible."
- Hannah Arendt

"We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears."
- Francois duc de la Rochefoucauld

"It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he is in love, drunk, or running for office."
- Shirley MacLaine

Miracles

"Making miracles is hard work, most people give up before they happen."
-Sheryl Crow

Conflicted

Tupac has been making very profound appearances in my dreams recently. Bizarre. What could that possibly mean? Today, I stumbled upon this Tupac quote. Normally, I would have skimmed right over it and not paid any serious attention to it, but becuase Tupac's role in my dreams has been lingering with me during my waking hours, I stopped, pondered, and now I sit with it.

"Everyone is at war with different things. Sometimes I think I am at war with my own heart."

- Tupac Shakur

I guess Rainer Maria Rilke understood his plight:

"Be patient toward everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.. Do not search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything... Live the questions now."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Truisms

Jenny Holzer, is a well known artist who focuses on text, delivered via LED screens and projectors, as her medium. She is best known for her "Truisms", a series of text statements, from the late 1970's. The most famous of her "Truisms" is "Protect Me From What I Want" which was projected in New York Times Square in 1982. In her ironic view, culture becomes a continuous loop of creating and sating desires that we barely know we have—or want to admit to.

Here are my favorite Jenny Holzer "Truisms":

• Being happy is more important than anything else
• Calm is more conducive to creativity than is anxiety
• Emotional responses ar as valuable as intellectual responses
• Faithfulness is a social not a biological law
• Fear is the greatest incapacitator
• Go all out in romance and let the chips fall where they may
• It's better to be naive than jaded
• Just believing something can make it happen
• Pain can be a very positive thing
• Playing it safe can cause a lot of damage in the long run
• Repetition is the best way to learn
• The cruelest disappointment is when you let yourself down
• The sum of your actions determines what you are
• Unquestioning love demonstrates largeness of spirit
• When something terrible happens people wake up
• You must have one grand passion
• Your oldest fears are the worst ones

One of these days I will compile a collection of my own Truisms, but it is in its ground floor phase. Still.

Attraversiamo

This is the only Italian word that I know, and for good reason I suppose.

attraversare (Italian) verb
to cross, to go through, to run through

"I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Esprit

Esprit (Fr)./ Spirit (En.); noun: Life, or living substance, considered independently of corporeal existence; an intelligence conceived of apart from any physical organization or embodiment; vital essence, force, or energy, as distinct from matter.

“The most important thing is to work on the spirit, to feel like a feather — lighter and lighter.”
- Jil Sander

Soeurs

Soeurs (Fr.)/ Sisters (En.); noun
- A female having the same parents as another or one parent in common with another.
- A girl or woman who shares a common ancestry, allegiance, character, or purpose with another or others, specifically:
- A kinswoman.
- A close woman friend or companion.
- One identified as female and closely related to another.

“There can be no situation in life in which the conversation of my dear sister will not administer some comfort to me.”
- Mary Worley Montagu

Today I am grateful for the sisters that I am blessed with in all of the various cities where they reside.

Je t'aime

"When good Americans die, they go to Paris."
-Oscar Wilde

Traversée

Traversée
(voyage: noun): Crossing, passage, voyage, traverse

"I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen."

"...people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments."


"...to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice."

— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Suivant

Suivant
(Following adj., prep.): immediately following in time or order; next, subsequent.

The great thing about Paris is that just when you have seen the most beautiful sight, had the most amazing experience, tasted the most delicious morsel, or sipped the most exquisite beverage, there is something even more magnificent around the corner. I think that this is true for life in general (it's your choice), but for me, Paris just heightens my awareness.

Déplier

Déplier (Unfold, verb)
To open

What does it mean to be open to everything and attached to nothing?

We are beings of unlimited potential and the only thing holding us back from experiencing whatever we desire is any limiting beliefs we hold about life. If we attach ourselves to a belief with enough conviction, we will effectively disallow any desire that doesn't align with that belief to manifest in our reality.