Wild - Tumblr Posts
As difficult and maddening as the trail could be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn't offer up some form of what was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular-the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
I didn't know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you've not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you're still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your stealing-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and a thief, does that make you good?
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.
Cheryl Strayed
You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
If I could go back in time I'd make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn't know what I couldn't know until I became a mom, and so I'm certain there are things I don't know because I can't know because I did. Who would I have nurtured had I not been nurturing my two children over these past seven years? In what creative and practical forces would my love have been gathered up? What didn't I write because I was catching my children at the bottoms of slides and spotting them as they balanced along the tops of low brick walls and pushing them endlessly in swings? What did I write because I did? Would I be happier and more intelligent and prettier if I had been free all this time to read in silence on a couch that sat opposite of Mr. Sugar's? Would I complain less? Has sleep deprivation and the consumption of an exorbitant number of Annie's Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies taken years off my life or added years onto it? Who would I have met if I had bicycled across Iceland and hiked around Mongolia and what would I have experienced and where would that have taken me? I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.
Cheryl Strayed
At a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
‘No' is golden. 'No' is the kind of power the good witch wields. It's the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. It’s about the person who’s being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker it would say: Don’t own other people’s crap. The world would be a better place if we all did that.
Cheryl Strayed
I receive a lot of letters like yours. Most go on in length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same question at its core: Can I convince the person about whom I am crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.
Cheryl Strayed
You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man [or woman] who doesn't love you be one of them.
Cheryl Strayed
The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail