All deep loss has one thing in common: It opens an absence so acutely felt it kidnaps us from presence, takes us away from our own lives and their insistent, inconvenient, sacred ongoingness. In memory or in fantasy, we end up refugees from reality, ceding the only thing that is ever ours for the keeping: the living moment. In all missing, we miss life.
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And having traveled so much for 51 years around the globe, I've always felt that when I think of escape, it's not so important where you're escaping to, but what you're escaping from. And famously, if an angry person goes to Tibet, he starts complaining about the altitude. In other words, he's gone to a beautiful place, but he hasn't escaped himself.
Pico Iyer — TED Radio Hour
if you think about losing everything in a forest fire, it sounds so terrifying, but in my case, for all the terrible losses, slowly all kinds of doors opened and made possible things that might never have happened otherwise. It was like being given a fresh start and a chance to make my life up again from scratch with this tabula rasa and really to craft a life much closer to the life I'd always wanted to lead, a much simpler life, much less cluttered. And so in certain ways, the fire actually saved me from myself and gave me the opportunity to start again.
Pico Iyer — TED Radio Hour
When in disgrace with fortune in men's eyes, I all alone bewep my outcast state and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries and look upon myself and curse my fate. Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, featured like him. Like him with friends possessed, desiring this man's art and that man's scope, with what I most enjoy contented least. Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, happily I think on thee, and then my state, like to the lark at break of day, arising from sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.
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