You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the idea that what we often seek as an escape may actually be a deeper desire for connection and understanding.
Cheryl Strayed's quote speaks to the internal struggle of longing for change or escape, yet realizing that the true desire is not to run away but to delve deeper into oneself and one's experiences. It highlights the paradox of human yearning, where the pursuit of freedom can sometimes obscure the more profound need for growth and understanding within our own lives. Strayed invites us to reconsider the true depths of our desires and the importance of introspection.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a personal development workshop to inspire deeper reflection.
More from Cheryl Strayed
All quotes βThe obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
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.
There is a path toward the light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you're doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.
Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and 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.
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The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery.
Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.
There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.