Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the distinction between pursuing financial livelihood and seeking fulfillment in life.
Pico Iyer's quote reflects the tension between dedicating oneself to work for survival and engaging in activities that lead to a meaningful and enriched life. While making a living is often about meeting financial obligations and social expectations, making a life requires introspection, passion, and the pursuit of personal happiness, which can sometimes lead to conflicting paths. This dichotomy urges individuals to find a balance that allows them to thrive both materially and spiritually.
In practice
During a motivational speech about work-life balance, this quote can illustrate the importance of prioritizing personal happiness.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.
The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
It's a thin line between paper and hate,_x000D_ _x000D_ Friends and snakes, nine millis and thirty-eights,_x000D_ _x000D_ Hell or the pearly gates...I was destined to come,_x000D_ _x000D_ Predicted, blame God, He blew breath in my lungs.
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least.
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