101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

who have 
LOST LOVE 
KNOW
The people who have lost love know that someone else’s love isn’t
yours to lose.
Someone else’s love is yours to experience, but anything beyond
that is just becoming attached to an idea, a hope, a big ol' “supposed
to be.” The people who have lost love know that right there is the
point at which you lose yourself—when you start believing someone
else will carry some part of you with them when they walk away.
When you start seeking salvation in the very person you have to be
saved from, believing that someone else—someone other than
yourself—can save you.
The people who have lost love know that you can lose things you
never really had, end relationships that never really started, that
never ran the course of all the dreams and plans you had together.
They know that you can mourn people who were never really there
at all.
The people who have lost love know what it means to fill the empty
spaces in your bed with pillows and in your life with work or dates
that don’t matter much or just the acknowledgement of sadness.
They know the therapeutic quality of embracing it.
They know what it means to be absolutely certain there is no
feasible way you could ever love somebody as much as you love
that one person. They know what it’s like to have your concept of
logic and sense and justice and fairness and “supposed to be”
turned all the way on its ass.
They know that you don’t always spend forever with the person you
love the most, but you can spend forever trying to reconcile that fact
in your mind.

---

And more importantly than those things, they know that moving on
isn’t a conscious choice, but rather what happens when you stop
trying to. When you stop forcing yourself to forget. You forget about
them when you start thinking about you.
They know what it’s like to look back on the things they thought
they’d never get over, and to realize that even the hardest things
somehow dissipate with time, ease with understanding, release with
awareness.
They know there is incomparable strength in having seen yourself
through the worst.
They consider their actions before they’re reckless with other
people. They know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of
carelessness. They become the gentle lovers and cautious suitors
whose hesitation and timidity might be confused for indifference—but
it’s not, and this is significant. They gain a reverence, and an
understanding, of just how deep a human heart can love and how
fragile an ego can break.
The people who have lost love know that tight, stinging, burning
feeling in your chest and throat and legs. They know what depths
panic can drive you to when you’ve exhausted every option.
They know that soul mates aren’t what people think they are—they
aren’t happily ever after most of the time. They are a love that lights
every part of you up and exposes the unhealed layers; your true soul
mate is the one who shows you to yourself.
And they know that’s the point.
They know that you can love a person, but never as much as you
can miss them. They know what it’s like to have no choice but to live
in the moment, to have to mentally walk yourself through every hour
of the day, because otherwise your awareness will be pulled from
sifting through what happened and worrying about what will and
wondering about where they are and if they even cared at all.
They know to appreciate what they have while they have it.
They know that there may be no deeper pain than seeing someone
you love be in love with someone else. Or, more accurately,
someone you thought belonged to you suddenly belonging to
someone else. That simply. For all the great oceans of depth that

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you could feel running between you, that it can be over in a simple
drop.
They know what it’s like to carefully daydream running into that lost
love again. They know what it’s like to be picking out clothes with
them in mind, rehearsing conversations alone in your bedroom,
cutting their hair and running a mile longer as though a simple shift
of appearance could make someone fall in love again.
They know what it’s like to actually run into them when they’re with
someone else. Someone else who is in so many ways not what they
are, for better, for worse.
From that extraordinary pain, they learn that someone’s love for
you isn’t lessened or greatened by how much they love someone
else. It’s not a singular, expendable thing.
And that knowing this may be the greatest lesson of all.
They know what it’s like to live with the ghost of what would have
and should have and maybe-still-could-be. To be walking down the
street with the constantly running narrative of what they’d be saying,
what they’d be thinking, if only they were there. To be out at the bar
when the conversation seems to drift from your awareness and all of
a sudden all you can focus on is the faint thought of what it would be
if they were sitting next to you. To be holding your basket in line at
the grocery store and hear your song come on and all of a sudden,
to be imagining all the ways you once thought they imagined you,
and how they must think those very same thoughts, send those very
same texts, act that very same way, just with someone else.
They know what it’s like for there to be strangers in the world who
once knew everything about you.
They know that you somehow always call into your life exactly what
you need—the most painful, the most changing amongst it.
They know you never lose love. They know that what you
experience, how you grow, what you take and learn and see and do
because of it, is the point. Not to have it forever, but to become what
it was meant to make you.
They know that—at first—you’ll spend your time trying to figure out
what to do with all the love that is left lingering.
And they know that you’re supposed to give it to yourself.

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70
SIMPLICITY.
Learn to like what doesn’t cost much. Those are the things worth
your time. You can buy your way into things and places, but you
can’t actually buy the experience of them. It’s not what you do; it’s
what you perceive. A meaningful life isn’t how often you can saturate
your senses, but how you grow to think of even the simplest, most
unassuming daily things.
Learn to like reading, whatever it is you like to read. Learn to like
talking and people, even when they’re not the same as you. Learn
that truths can coexist. That’s the one thing that will set you free in
this world.
Learn to like simple foods and cooking them. Learn to like fields,
trees, camping, walking, fires, watching the day break and end.
Learn to like writing and burning candles on rainy summer early
evenings. Learn to like clean linens and washing dishes and hot
baths and drinking water and long, meandering drives.
Learn to keep your needs simple and your wants small.
Learn to breathe deeply. To taste food when you eat it, to sleep
deeply when you sleep. When you laugh, let it carry on until you’re
sweating and out of breath. When you get angry, get really angry,
just let things burn through you. The less you push these things
away, the less they come out in inappropriate and debilitating ways.
It’s not anger or the sadness that controls you; it’s the resistance of it
that keeps them tucked in their place in your soul.
Learn to let negative thoughts drift back to where they came from—
nowhere.
Do the things that are effortless. Let them be effortless. Find love
that’s effortless. You’ll be instructed to believe that success comes
from grueling, soul-bending hard work, but that’s more something we
impose on ourselves because letting effortless things also be
successful ones makes them feel unmerited. That’s how we create
problems where there are none.

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Decide to keep nothing but what is meaningful and purposeful.
When you cycle and circle around your space, touching, seeing, and
using only things that evoke a feeling of security, purpose, meaning,
joy…your everyday life becomes grounded in happiness. When
there’s not enough to make a mess, no more than you can clean and
wash and handle, everything feels settled.
Complexity is often the easiest choice. It’s easy to let ourselves get
wound up and bound down to the ways we let our thoughts and fears
run narratives into storylines into realities we live out.
Simplicity is difficult because it requires clean thinking. It’s the long,
hard way to a cleansed perception (that is: not shadowed by
conditioning or negative thoughts). But it’s yours, and yours always.
You can keep all of one hundred belongings for the rest of your life,
and every one of them will be used, broken, replaced, taken, thrown
out, rendered obsolete. But your perception of how meaningful and
useful those temporary things were, how much you appreciated and
enjoyed them—that’s yours. And that is what choosing a life rooted
in simplicity does: makes the ordinary miraculous.
People like to make big claims of what will bring you happiness. And
happiness, in some form, is what we’re all seeking, even if we don’t
place that word on it. Stability, love, money. Happy psychology, the
phenomenon of the last 25+ years, has come about really for the fact
that we pioneered a country for the sake of unbridled, radical
happiness: religious liberation, freedom, democracy.
Yet these things, these houses that hold us and companies we run,
these relationships we fail at because we’re constantly expecting
them to be more—the desire to max out pleasure—has not made us
happier.
Because we have not changed how we think—and that’s the only
real change that ever happens, because it’s the basis of how we
feel. The magnitude of one’s life is directly parallel to how deep their
perception of it is. Your life grows as you do. What you experience is
a reflection of what you are.
Do not forget that you do not have forever to do this, to change
this.

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It’s easy to let another day, week, month, year slip by, letting
yourself keep seeking the light in people and money and more and
more and more. It’s easier to spend that time seeking the light in
yourself because you think that’s the right thing to do. You don’t find
the light—the ability to perceive—because you already are it. The
work is getting rid of everything that stands in the way.

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71
18 LITTLE 
REMINDERS 
FOR ANYONE