Live & Love

 Don't throw yourself out on another's whim. 

People change, as do intentions and as a result, consequences. 

Live for yourself -- love those around you, but realize that they’ve got their own agendas.

 That’s the thing about the Earth: It doesn’t stop to acknowledge the daily disasters of the living. It just keeps spinning and sucking. I think that’s what drives people towards faith, that unsettling realization that the physical world goes on without them, before them, after them, without recognition or sympathy.

 So just live, have wonderful times and make mistakes... 

but never second guess where you've been, where you are, 
and most of all where you're going.

She's Only Happy in the Sun

 She's only happy in the sun

Did you find what you were after?
The pain and the laughter brought you to your knees
But if the sun sets you free, sets you free
You'll be free indeed, Indeed

She's only happy in the sun
She's only happy in the sun

 So come on, get higher, loosen my lips
Faith and desire and the swing of your hips
Just pull me down hard
And drown me in love

Travel Through Life

 “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” 

– Mark Twain

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights;
it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” 

– Miriam Beard

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” 

– Mark Jenkins 

Balance

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.
And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

 That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things.

It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about.

To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.

Forever

 "No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together."

"Life can be long or short, it all depends on how you choose to live it. It's like forever, always changing. For any of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You can never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count. What you have to decide is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, is this how you'd want to have spent it?"

Family

Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.

 The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.

In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.

Happiness

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.