we are all in our early 20′s beating ourselves up for not having perfect beautiful apartments and wise carefully curated hobbies and self image! there is no rush!
so you dated the wrong person and learned a hard lesson. you chose the wrong major and had to start over again. you cherished a friend who backstabbed you. it sucks, but it’s also going to work out. that’s life; you learn, hurt, love, cry, laugh, and keep going. you experience setbacks and you grow and it’s all okay.
I drew this poster for Jon Acuffand his FINISH book tour. Big thanks to Jon for this collaboration, his book has some great ideas about how to complete creative and life goals.
“TW: “I was at a lunch with the Dalai Lama and five Buddhist teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. We were sitting in a charming room with white carpets and many windows. The food was a delightful, fragrant, vegetarian Indian meal. There were lovely flower arrangements on the table. “We were discussing sexual misconduct among Western Buddhist teachers. A woman Buddhist from California brought up someone who was using his students for his own sexual needs. One woman said, ‘We are working with him with compassion, trying to get him to understand his motives for exploiting female students and to help him change his actions.’ “The Dalai Lama slammed his fist on the table, saying loudly, ‘Compassion is fine, but it has to stop! And those doing it should be exposed!’ All the serving plates on the table jumped, the water glasses tipped precariously, and I almost choked on the bite of saffron rice in my mouth. “Suddenly I saw him as a fierce manifestation of compassion and realized that this clarity did not mean that the Dalai Lama had moved away from compassion. Rather, he was bringing compassion and manifesting it as decisive fierceness. His magnetism was glowing like a fire. “I will always remember that day, because it was such a good teaching on compassion and precision. Compassion is not a wishy-washy ‘anything goes’ approach. Compassion can say a fierce no!”
“‘Please tell me this is a dream?’ “Yes, yes, it’s just a dream. You’re just dreaming. You are just a dream by a soul sleeping in heaven. And I can see that you have woken from your sleep to ask me this. Something very, very rare in a time of such malice, despair, and heartache… for one to rouse from this comatose slumber and leave her dream To be awake during a nightmare is something impressive, remarkable, and sources from pure, sacrificial love. For that we hand you the Master Keys to Atlantis, and the ocean is your legacy that reflects each part of you. And so you say, as the wise one does, ‘how do I know that you are not just another character in my dream’, and the answer is, that, you don’t know….who is even having this dream to begin with?”