Guardrails
Your conscious should light up when:

1. it dawns on you that your core group isn't moving in the direction you want your life to be moving

2. you catch yourself pretending to be someone other than who you really are

3. you feel pressure to compromise

4. you hear yourself say "i'll go, but i won't participate"

5. you hope the people you care about most don't find out where you've been or who you've been with

"Your life is limited; so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

- Steve Jobs

Revisiting an old favorite:

Sweet Darkness
...

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you. 

- David Whyte

Question for decision making. Ask it!

In light of my past experience

my current circumstances

my future hopes and dreams

What is the wise thing to do?

I just love this woman, what she has to say as well as her artwork. It's weird how a role model can be a random stranger who doesn't feel like one at all. There's something about this one that grabs me at this uneasy time of feeling seen and unseen, known and unknown, yet thankfully not a stranger after all. To be...Known.

Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, on love, as highlighted in Krista Tippett's interview with Helen Fisher:

"Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love,' is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. And yet, as we all know, it is a madness that, however ferocious, seldom, if ever, lasts... But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is, and the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel that passion slip away. No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all."

Lessons from chickens (on sabbath):