This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, … - Maria Popova

Some of our dormant multitudes come awake with a catlike stretch, slowly and lazily over years of personal development. Others leap into being with the jolt of an alarm sounded by a particular event or person who has entered our lives at a particular moment — rarely anticipated, almost never convenient, always transformational. On those rare, momentous mornings, one looks into the bathroom mirror and greets — sometimes grudgingly, sometimes gleefully — the gladsome stranger of oneself.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?