The most transformative, revolutionary peace comes from the ocean, not the pond. It is the peace that can change the temperature of a room just through its presence. It is the peace that remains unwavering amid even the greatest challenges.
When we think of sacrifice, we perhaps imagine sacrificing our own needs, peace, and well-being to provide for our family or do good in the world. Modern sacrifice has become about sacrificing ourselves for something beyond ourselves. But there’s another version of modern sacrifice that’s much more helpful.
An overlooked peace practice is simply spending time with others, especially those in the throes of burnout. It’s telling them about your burnout. It’s admitting that it is real.
Get more sleep. Drink more water. Move your body more. Go outside more. Eat whole, green foods as much as possible.
You don’t need to do it all. You cannot do it all. The world does not need or want you to do it all.
Often, our best lever for managing burnout is managing our coping strategies, all the subtle ways we undermine our long-term peace and well-being in the name of temporary relief.
This book is for purpose-driven people who’ve trapped themselves in a life of striving and inadequacy out of an endless need to prove themselves, so they can spend less energy validating their existence and more of it serving those truly in need.
We often treat the heroic impulse running through modern culture as some capital-T Truth woven into the very fabric of the human spirit. As if rejecting it would betray our humanity or reveal us to be somehow less than the Platonic form of a good human. But as the Taoists and many others show us, heroism is not a human-wide value.
The aspiring hero takes on lofty ambitions for what they do in the world. In contrast, the antihero learns to cultivate humbler aspirations.
Peace requires active, daily tending, not because we are broken but because the world we live in is relentlessly trying to disrupt us, relentlessly beckoning us to want and do more.
