Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away.

There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.