More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
Interpretation
We often find ourselves overwhelmed by life's demands, like doctors who must care for others while neglecting our own needs.
Pico Iyer uses the metaphor of emergency-room physicians to illustrate how modern life forces individuals to be constantly available and responsible for their own well-being amidst chaos. This quote reflects the struggle of balancing personal health and managing the clutter of daily responsibilities and distractions that can prevent us from caring for ourselves properly.
In practice
During a mental health seminar, a speaker might quote this to emphasize the importance of prioritizing self-care.
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.
My first wish is, to see this plague of mankind banished from the earth, and the sons and daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements, than in preparing implements, and exercising them, for the destruction of mankind.
We've been trained to squint into a legal microscope, hoping that we can judge any dispute against the standard of a perfect society where everyone will agree what's fair, and where accidents will be extinct, and risk will be no more.
There are no souls in the world that are so fearful to judge others as those that do most judge themselves, nor so careful to make a righteous judgment of men or things as those that are most careful to judge themselves.
There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
I well remember it being said to me by an occultist of great experience that two things are necessary for safety in occultism, right motives and right associates.
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