The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
Interpretation
True fulfillment comes from investing fully in life and love, despite fears.
This quote emphasizes the importance of living boldly and authentically, suggesting that the value of life is measured by how much heart one invests in their experiences and relationships. It highlights that regrets stem from not embracing opportunities for love and connection due to fears, rather than from material or superficial concerns.
In practice
In a motivational speech about pursuing one's dreams and not holding back.
...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.
Haven’t you heard of the music of the spheres?” asked the dragon. “It’s the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I’m a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.
You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze_x000D_ _x000D_ About a star of deathless and painless peace_x000D_ _x000D_ But no astronomer can find where it is.
In order to trust your body as a guide, the first step is to begin to understand it.
You must ask for what you really want.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Some habits of ineffectiveness are rooted in our social conditioning toward quick-fix, short-term thinking.
Never let life's hardships disturb you. No one can avoid problems, not even saints or sages.
Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.
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