Joan Didion Commencement Address at Riverside, 1975

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.

Jenny Offill, Weather

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. 

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you." 

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. 

bell hooks, Thinking About Love

"One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. 

It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself."

Lisel Mueller - “Tears”

The first woman who ever wept

was appalled at what stung

her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

Saltwater. Seawater. 

How was it possible? 

Hadn't she and the man

spent many days moving

upland to where the grass

flourished, where the stream

quenched their thirst with sweet water?

How could she have carried these sea drops

as if they were precious seeds; 

where could she have stowed them? 

She looked at the watchful gazelles

and the heavy-lidded frogs;

she looked at glass-eyed birds

and nervous, black-eyed mice.

None of them wept, not even the fish

that dripped in her hands when she caught them.

Not even the man. Only she carried the sea inside her body. 

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

She was handling it well, even though some mornings she put her bra on inside-out and it seemed too hard to fix, so she just sat there staring at the news in an inside-out bra. She was handing it just fine, even though her face had been replaced by one question mark after another question mark after another question mark, and her heart had been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach, and the only way it was possible to comfort herself anymore was to stand in front of the mirror and say out loud, "Cows don't know about him."

 

Charles B. Brenner & Jeffrey M. Zacks in Scientific American, December 13, 2011

So there's the thing we know best:  The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do.  We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn't pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn't important enough.  But a "completely different" idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame.  The first part of their paper's title sums it up:  "Walking through doorways causes forgetting."

…

The doorway effect suggests that there's more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried.  Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff.  Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an "event model," and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues.  That thing in the box?  Oh, that's from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that.