(1) Be Gretchen (meaning herself - meaning to be ourselves)
(2) Let it go
(3) Act the way I want to feel
(4) Do it now
(5) Be polite and be fair
(6) Enjoy the process
(7) Spend out
(8) Identify the problem
(9) Lighten up
(10) Do what ought to be done
(11) No calculation
(12) There is only love
She talks about the paradox of happiness, the paradox of (1) by which she wants to be herself but yet wants to change herself for the better. She elaborates on all of them and I really think these 12 commandments make plenty of sense. It's something I think I'm going try aiming for in life. Much inspired!
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Speaking of books, I am also highly tempted to get 10 books from book depository. Very. Tempted. It's killing me! David Levithan, Angela Carter, Jonathan Safran Foer - all my favourite authors.
"The Labyrinth" from Under A Glass Bell by Anais Nin. Short stories/anthologies complete my life.
I was eleven years old when I walked into the labyrinth of my diary. I carried it in a little basket and climbed the moldy steps of a Spanish garden and came upon boxed streets in neat order in a backyard of a house in New York. I walked protected by dark green shadows and followed a design I was sure to remember. I wanted to remember in order to be able to return. As I walked, I walked with the desire to see all things twice so as to find my way back into them again. The bushes were soft hairy elbows touching mine, the branches swords over my head. They led me. I did not count the turns, the chess moves, the meditated displacements, the obsessional repetitions. The repetitions prevented me from counting the hours and the steps. The obsessions became the infinite. I was lost. I only stopped because of the clock pointing to anguish. An anguish about returning, and about seeing these things but once. There was a definite feeling that their meaning could only be revealed a second time. If I were forced to go on, unknowing, blind, everything would be lost. I was infinitely far from my first steps. I did not know exactly why I must return. I did not know that at the end I would not find myself where I started. The beginning and the end were different, and why should the coming to an end annihilate the beginning? And why should the beginning be retained? I did not know, but for the anguish in my being, an anguish over something lost. The darkness before me was darker than the darkness behind me.
Everything was so much the same and equal before and around me that I was not certain I had turned sufficiently in the path to be actually walking towards the place from which I started. The clouds were the same, the croaking of the frogs, the soft rain sound of fountains, and the immobile green flame of evergreens in boxes. I was walking on a carpet of pages without number. Why had I not numbered the pages? Because I was aware of what I had left out; so much was left out that I had intended to insert, and numbering was impossible, for numbering would mean I had said everything. I was walking up a stairway of words. The words repeated themselves. I was walking on the word pity pity pity pity pity pity. My step covered the whole world each time, but then I saw I was not walking. When the word was the same, it did not move, nor did my feet. The word died. And the anguish came, about the death of this word, about the death of the feeling inside of this word. The landscape did not change, the walk was without corners; the paths so mysteriously enchained I never knew when I had to turn to the right or the left. I was walking on the word obsession with naked feet: the trees seemed to press closer together, and breathing was difficult. I was seeking the month, the year, the hour, which might have helped me to return.
