One day you will realize that happiness is not what your house looks like, but how you love the people within its walls.
Happiness is not finding success by a certain time, but finding something you love so much time itself seems to disappear.
Happiness is not thinking you have earned the world’s approval, but waking up each day and feeling so at peace within your skin, quietly anticipating the day ahead, unconcerned with how you are perceived.
And also, happiness is not having the best of everything, but the ability to make the best of anything.
Happiness is knowing you are doing what you can with what you were given.
Happiness is not something that comes to you when every problem is solved and all things are perfectly in place, but in the shining silver linings that remind us the light of day is always there, if you slow down enough to notice.
EK #02
Two rivers are running through us at all times, one that carries all the voices of the world, and the other, a single voice that stands alone as the voice of our inner guide.
The first river is so strong, steady, and constant with its instruction, guidance, and forewarning; most of us live mindlessly being pulled to each milestone, each thing we were told to reach for, to move toward, to achieve.
Eventually, we look down and realize our hands are empty.
Our lives were woven together by a storyline we didn’t write.
As we lose sight of our inner compass, a fog is cast over our awareness of the moment.
We become saddled with confusion, indecision, and uncertainty.
We become incapable of leading ourselves because the two rivers are shouting over one another, tempting us with virtues, and repelling us with vices.
Over time, we become consumed by the stiffness of trying to be what we are told, existing in contrast to the soft, effervescent truth living deep inside.
Despite how loud that first river can become, we can always hear the quiet call of the second.
EK #03
Our lives begin the day we choose to follow our inner knowing, even while hearing, at times heeding, the collective knowledge of the first.
The first realization of wisdom is the recognition that there is truth fragmented everywhere, and to delineate the two rivers into wholly good and wholly bad is to deprive ourselves of the depth and beauty that our hearts are truly trying to bring about.
The journey is not about abandoning one in favour of the other, but knowing when it is time to listen, to hear, and to follow each.
EK #04
Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you want to get up in the morning.
Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes.
Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at the hundred things that do not light up your soul,
Finally choose the one that does the one that asks you to risks, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared.
You’re not failing because you’re not motivated.
You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.
EK #05
Whatever pain you think you are in right now cannot begin to compare to the peace that will one day come over you.
It cannot begin to compare to the joy that you will one day know.
You will fall in love with life again, and it will be better than it was before because you will become a different person.
You will become more capable of appreciating what matters, will not be as reckless with your choices, and can no longer be so easily swayed or mindlessly trusting.
You will require a new level of integrity within your life, which will transpire into better boundaries and a more stable foundation.
You will strengthen in the most unexpected ways, and from that, your happiness will be even more sincere, even more apparent.
This will not happen overnight, though it will seem like it did in retrospect. Like the changing of a season, everything shifts slowly until all of a sudden, you are standing firmly in the after, in all you feared would never come.
You’re through it, but you’re different because something also moved through you and cleared out what you didn’t even realize was standing in the way.
EK #06
You do not have to be grateful for everything in your life.
You do not have to be grateful for what you survived, for what you didn’t know, for the lessons learned too hard.
You do not have to be grateful for the unfairness, of living in a world that does not value dignity the way that it should, a world that has lost its soul.
But even amid the storm, when you stumble upon a glimmer of appreciation,
I hope you will hold onto that.
I hope you will know that it is as real as anything else.
I hope you will give it as much attention as you can give.
I hope you will remember that silver linings foretell the light of day that will come.
I hope you will know that just because you are not grateful for all of it doesn’t mean you aren’t grateful for any of it.
I hope you will allow yourself to contain more than one truth that not every phase of your life will tell the same story.
That not every piece of this existence will flow congruently to the last.
That more is possible, even if the past did not show you that it is.
That our greatest dreams and our deepest fears may coexist, and the existence of one does not negate or lessen the other.
That the very moment that you honour where you are with complete surrender, you open to the next experience life wants to offer.
EK #07
Maybe you should trust the missed connections, the calls that have gone unanswered, the opportunities that had every reason to work out but didn’t.
Maybe you should trust in the small signs before they become big ones.
Maybe you should trust those tiny contractions, the nights that exhaust you and the people who don’t see you, and the places that make you feel that subtle uneasiness.
Maybe you should learn to trust in what passes you by so you’ll begin to trust in what lands right in front of you.
Maybe you should trust that in what isn’t working because it might be trying to guide you to what will.
EK #08
What is meant for you will arrive in your life and it will remain in your life.
What did not transpire was not meant to; the end of that journey would not have led you somewhere you would have wanted or needed to be.
If you are honest with yourself, you know this on the inside.
There were so many signs that you willingly brushed over in the heat of blind hope.
If you spend your life fixated on the might-have-been, you miss out on the steady currents that have carried you all this way.
Notice what stays.
Notice what is constant.
Notice what perseveres.
These are the things that the song of your life will be composed of.
EK #09
It is the willingness to stay soft in a world that tries to harden you at every corner.
It is the ability to absorb your own emotions and diffuse them, to decide what you want to act on and what you want to put back out into the world, regardless of what the world has put you through.
Kind people are not just good, they are heroes in their own ways.
Their ability to not reciprocate unkindness to a world that often deserves it makes them catalysts for the deepest healing to occur.
EK #10
I hope you learn to live in a way that makes you glad to be alive.
I’m not glad for your elevator speech, your accolades, or what you believe the world sees you as.
Not where you are glad for all that you might do one day, but the beauty with which you experience the smallest and most unassuming of things.
I hope you learn to live in a way that makes you excited for the day ahead, for whatever it is you are meant to do with this period, with this corner of the world, with this one body and life that is yours.
I hope you learn to experience living, instead of just imagining how your life is seen.
I hope you learn to feel it, with everything inside you.
I hope you learn to be alive.
EK #11
In an unawaken state, your power is fully externalized.
Your faith is placed disproportionately on the systems, regulations, and structures that never had any intention of moving you past where you are now into where you could be.
It is often when you reach complete exhaustion and exasperation with this view of the world that you begin to go inward and discover something solvent of the power that’s within.
As you begin to wake up to that power, you often overuse it.
You assume you are a god unto yourself, the tiny particles around which the entire universe will bend and break and reform.
You begin to shake off this illusion when you realize that the things you insisted on creating did not turn out as perfectly as you once imagined.
You begin to take other people into account, their timing and their needs.
You start to see that you cannot see everything, and so begins the true journey of your life, which is the dance between what is yours to handle and what is yours to release.
What you must reach for, and what you must allow to come.
When it is time to speak, and when it is time to listen.
When it is time to teach, and when it is time to learn.
When it is time to exert your will and when it is time to surrender to a path far greater than anything you could conceive of prior.
This is what it is to live to understand your free will and develop the discernment to use it well.
EK #12
You are an ocean of unrealized potential.
You cannot imagine how deep and how wide your capacity is unless it’s been tested, until you’ve been moved beyond where you thought your limits were, and have had to redefine them.
In this, you find new energy. You find a better rhythm.
You rediscover everything you believed you had lost.
Our life force can never truly escape us, but it can be withheld until our bodies feel safe enough to begin again.
Give yourself the time you need to regulate your new normal and let yourself witness with each passing day that it is once again safe to exhale, step outside your comfort zone, to trust in the unknown.
Slowly, you will learn to take hold of that wild spirit within you once again, and this time, you will be more focused, and more intentional.
You will be more discerning about who and what you allow into your life, into your headspace. You will move forward with more mindfulness.
You will begin to see that when your energy is leaking out into a thousand different directions, you cannot fully invest your potential.
You will begin to see that it was never about whether or not you were capable of becoming what you most desire,
But that you were simply distracted, unknowingly surrounded by those who infused a sense of disbelief so deeply into your subconscious mind, self-limiting beliefs became the parameters in which you thought you had to experience this world.
You will begin to decide what matters to you, what you want to experience while you are alive, and gently, and lovingly, release the rest in time.
