“I have come to terms with life – nothing can happen to me, and my personal fate is not the issue…. By ‘coming to terms with life’ I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.” – Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: the Journal of a Young Jewish Woman, 1941-1943 (HT: inward/outward)
The words above articulate some of the intuitive musings I’ve been having the past weeks.
fuiyoo…. this quote has the impact of a typhoon. good one, dude.
millemeow – we need some “typhoons” once a while … to shake us out from our routine mindless existence.