Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward. I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. Cheryl Strayed More Quotes by Cheryl Strayed More Quotes From Cheryl Strayed You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding and my dear one, you and I have been granted a mighty generous one. Cheryl Strayed should-have play believe Going down (descending), I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yard on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. Cheryl Strayed sweaters knitting hiking Run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Cheryl Strayed bridges dream running I was trying to find a new home in the world. Cheryl Strayed home trying world ...the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having been nailed to the cross. Cheryl Strayed other-half rising half He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life. Cheryl Strayed life-changing dark inspirational And every last one of us can do better than give up. Cheryl Strayed giving-up lasts giving If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help. Cheryl Strayed cheer letting-go morning You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all. Cheryl Strayed love-you giving people The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. Cheryl Strayed dont-give-up giving-up believe I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle. Cheryl Strayed new-life struggle long I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore. Cheryl Strayed knowing beautiful life No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives. Cheryl Strayed golden healthy people I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right. Cheryl Strayed edits figures writing It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. Cheryl Strayed sunset powerful philosophy I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. Cheryl Strayed yearning wanted way I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me. Cheryl Strayed pebbles branches tree Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to doI don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do. Cheryl Strayed adults years thinking I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away. Please, I thought. Please. Cheryl Strayed life-changing flower inspirational That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts. Cheryl Strayed ghost monsters way
