April | 2015 | Missing in the Mission

At one point – I don’t want to give away too much of the actual story – but at one point, she’s in an accident and breaks her foot, so she’s kind of immobilized. And so she’s thinking [reads aloud]:

Helpless, idle, it became clear to Bride why boredom was so fought against. Without distraction or physical activity, the mind shuffled pointless, scattered recollections around and around.

And that strikes me as, like, what you’re talking about when you’re not writing, when your mind is idle, that it just kind of goes through the shuffle of thoughts – in your case, negative thoughts [laughter] – that you dwell on in a way that you’d prefer not to.

— Terry Gross interviewing Toni Morrison and reading from her book God Help the Child

You can listen to the full interview here.

At the beginning of taking this time off, I thought about… I had this open question of, ‘Do I want to stay in the ‘do-gooder field,’ you know the humanitarian, NGO whatever. Because there’s a lot that’s wrong with it, and there’s a lot that doesn’t address, or doesn’t really get at root issues and root causes of suffering… I don’t want to get into idiot compassion, I don’t want to do it for that reason. When I think about other things that I have always had a strong interest in, when I was younger I thought I’d be an environmentalist. In another life, I must’ve been a dancer because I don’t really do dance at all in this life, but I idolize dancers.

Sokuzan: You already dance with your own life, the thing you do with your life is kind of a Continue reading →