Poetry: Language against which we have no defences. - David Whyte

One of the clichéd human answers to stress and overwork is to increase your speed and your velocity…

The great tragedy of this approach is that you cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity you are and you become a stranger to the slower, longer cycles of existence … and you find it hard to have compassion for anyone [at a slower pace] … you are afraid of stopping and they are reminding you that there is a part of the world that does periodically stops and takes a breath before it moves again. You don’t know who you’d be if you stopped and you get quite resentful … a kind of existential impatience and lack of generosity which comes from stressful approach to work.

Let the apple ripen
on the branch
beyond your need
to take it down.

One of the more restful achievements of having found the right partner in life is that we suddenly realize how much effort has previously gone into all the searching. Finding a mate takes enormous amounts of physical and emotional energy—dressing, comings and goings, and endless drama—which is why it can be so difficult to look again in midlife if we lose that happiness and must seek anew.