The GuideBook to Life

Because everyone has it except you.

Ever felt like everyone else has it figured out? One of the best books I have ever read that empathized with this fear is Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful. I would never have happened on this book or read it except at the recommendation of a friend and recent events in my life.

Octopus: Beasts that are more beautiful to us now because of our understanding of them

What I love about this book, which is about the author’s journey with anxiety, is that she says very early on she has no answer. She admits she doesn’t know but that she is sharing her explorations. And to begin, she asks, is fixing your anxiety the answer? She even asks the Dalai Lama how to get the mind to shut up, to which he acknowledges there is no use. Even the Dalai Lama cannot still his mind.

The New Question

So if there is no need to completely fix/get rid of many of the things we think are wrong with us, we should ask ourselves a new question: How do we keep living with these things while still having a great life?

I have gone about many of my days with the “don’t think about it” attitude. I am no longer an advocate of this, because I strongly believe that those things we try not to think about will only boil up again when we least want them to. Having studied ancient Chinese texts in college, I understand that way of thinking: the…