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“In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with the brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it…many big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself”
We transform, not only our lives but who we are, by living IN life and learning from our experiences. We cannot know whether something is going to be a loss or a gain until we have taken the plunge and experienced the choices we made. We can stay in boxes by wanting answers that cannot be given, or we can stay true to the givens of our lives; and in the experiencing, develop a deep, personal knowledge that keeps us luminous and connected to ourselves, one another, and to life itself. As Joanna Field said, “I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it”