The antidote to exhaustion is not rest; it's wholeheartedness. - David Whyte

And after you were up, when the light had come and the moon had gone, you found the path again waiting through the open window, the faces at the table gazing with you, as you sat with your coffee, silently letting the sense of rest seat home, the body ready to walk, in rhythm and in rhyme, with the given, unspoken source.

The room is still quite cold when the list of achievements is read but the atmosphere quickens when you hear what they loved, what they held in their affections…you realize what you learn you have lost [in someone dying] is you’ve lose what they loved and everything else is like chafe blown away.

We each have a particular way of shaping ourselves in the world. To take on someone else’s conversational style and to keep repeating other people’s questions as if they were our own is to exhaust ourselves. It doesn’t matter if it is the thoughts of Socrates or Susan Sontag. Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.