Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I'm always like "why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day."
But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you're inside the car, inside the situation, it's easy not to notice all the extra work you're doing just to maintain the status quo.
There's all sorts of work that we think of as "free" that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged by sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.
The next time you think you're tired from "nothing", consider instead that you're probably in situation where you're doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.
Especially when you print a six THOUSAND page report on accident and your coworker thankfully catches it a few hundred pages into printing.
"printer" is a special box with a demon inside it
Cities and Sketches on Instagram
The divine right of kings but it's a curse
Distances. #pascalcampion
Always be yourself. Express yourself, have faith in yourself. Don’t go looking for a successful personality and just duplicate it.
Bruce Lee (via purplebuddhaquotes)
reblog if ur mom is smart and beautiful
Honestly something that bothers me more than most things is having my compassion mistaken for naivety.
I know that another fish might eat this bullfrog right after I spend months rehabilitating it.
I know that turning a beetle back onto its legs won’t save it from falling over again when I walk away.
I know that there is no cosmic reward waiting for my soul based on how many worms I pick off a hot sidewalk to put into the mud, or how many times I’ve helped a a raccoon climb out of a too-deep trashcan.
I know things suffer, and things struggle, and things die uselessly all day long. I’m young and idealistic, but I’m not literally a child. I would never judge another person for walking by an injured bird, for ignoring a worm, or for not really caring about the fate of a frog in a pond full of, y’know, plenty of other frogs.
There is nothing wrong with that.
But I cannot cannot cannot look at something struggling and ignore it if I may have the power to help.
There is so much bad stuff in this world so far beyond my control, that I take comfort in the smallest, most thankless tasks. It’s a relief to say “I can help you in this moment,” even though they don’t understand.
I don’t need a devil’s advocate to tell me another fish probably ate that frog when I let it go, or that the raccoon probably ended up trapped in another dumpster the next night.
I know!!!! I know!!!!!!! But today I had the power to help! So I did! And it made me happy!
So just leave me alone alright thank u!!!!
stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life
“The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it then you make it worse because you project onto it all kinds of bogies and threats which don’t exist in it at all.
Whenever you meet a ghost, don’t run away. Because the ghost will capture the substance of your fear and materialise itself out of your own substance. It will kill you eventually because it will take over all your own vitality.
So, then, whenever confronted with a ghost walk straight into it. And it will disappear.”
— Alan Watts
tell me a pretty thing.