Tag: Cheryl Strayed

Move toward the light

What do you do when you don’t know what to do about something?

I talk to Mr. Sugar and my friends. I make lists. I attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my “best self”—the one that’s generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, bighearted, and grateful. I think really hard about what I’ll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain. I move toward the light, even if it’s a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

The possibility of rescue: Tiny Beautiful Things

In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it’s a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning the possibility of rescue.

— Steve Almond from the Introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

Pumped and primed and stoked and monitored

Our kitchen was a Coleman camp stove, a fire ring, an old-fashioned icebox Eddie built that depended on actual ice to keep things even mildly cool, a detached sink propped against an outside wall of the shack, and a bucket of water with a lid on it. Each component demanded just slightly less than it gave, needing to be tended and maintained, filled and unfilled, hauled and dumped, pumped and primed and stoked and monitored.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

The future has an ancient heart

There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.

–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Snow, alive in its dying

As omnipresent as the snow was, I also sensed its waning, melting imperceptibly by the minute all around me. It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life.

–Cheryl Strayed, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

The world is a story, not an equation

I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

–Cheryl Strayed, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Small tasks

At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

–Cheryl Strayed, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail