There are really only two options - you can feel things, or you can shut down. But, once you decide to feel things, you don't get to pick and choose what you feel.
You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.
I say all the time that if you really want to feel alive, it's not through striving for yourself. If you really want to feel alive, it's not through trying to get more things or get more success or climbing a corporate ladder or getting to the top. Because, once you get there, you realize that you don't really find happiness in that. If you want to feel alive and if you want to feel peace and happiness, give your life away. Do something that is outside of yourself for someone else. I think that's the way to truly feel alive.
I really hope that there are more young men coming to terms with the fact that they feel things and it's OK to feel things and to talk about how they feel about things. That's not weak. It's brave and strong and good.
I'm really lucky in the sense that I have the privilege of being able to pick and choose what I do and only pick projects I really love and feel I can bring something to and I can learn from.
I think if I pick the right thing to spend my time doing, then time moves differently, because I really can get fully immersed in things and feel very alive and challenged, but in a good way. I feel a sense of progress.
The things that motivate us are to help other people, to feel that we're useful, to feel that we're getting better, to feel that we are kind of living to our potential, to get a sense of meaning. All of those things are positive.
To shut down the ability to feel pain means you shut down all emotions, joy included. It makes our hearts feel small, it robs us of our joy, and really keeps us no safer.
The types of climbing that I choose to do I'm good at justifying. I do really try and pick things that I'm going to live through. I don't want to die, and I'm relatively cautious. I play with that line all the time. I want things that are very exciting, so much so that they can feel almost spiritual.
I'm such a contradiction: I eat really healthy, I go to the gym, but then I smoke two or three cigarettes a day, and I smoke other things as well. Overall, I feel really healthy. But sometimes I feel like I'm more sensitive to little things.
For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.
I feel like in order to challenge yourself you have to get out of and do things that feel wrong at first and find new things. It's important to look for those things.
Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.
I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.
I feel like only now in my life do I really get it -- do I feel that sense of calm. And I feel very grounded. I feel much more confident. I feel, you know, sexier, more intelligent, more to offer, more wisdom, more life experience to draw from.
I feel really fortunate and grateful that not only do I get to do what I love, but I get to do it and serve a conversation that I feel is necessary culturally. The fact that I get to bring those two passions together is amazing to me - that I get to use my art in order to inform my activism and vice versa!
I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.