Life is full of challenges and obstacles that can make us feel defeated and weak. However, the power of the human spirit coupled with the belief in magic can provide the inner strength necessary to endure anything that comes our way. Magic, although commonly associated with fantasy and fairy tales, can be seen as a metaphor for the power of our minds and the ability to tap into our inner resources. It represents the belief in the extraordinary and unseen forces that exist within us, waiting to be unleashed. When we truly believe that we can endure anything, we tap into this magical power within. It is this belief that pushes us to keep going when the going gets tough.
Difficulty does not arrive to keep us trapped. It arrives to show us the way we are trapping ourselves inside a life we no longer want.
Your soul made you stay still until you learned what you needed to know, and healed what you needed to release, and realized what you needed to see, and became who you needed to be. Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms--and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.
It is this belief that pushes us to keep going when the going gets tough. The power of will allows us to persevere in the face of adversity, to find hope in times of despair, and to summon the courage to face our fears. The main idea behind this concept is that if we truly believe that we can endure anything, then we will.
Joan Didion > Quotes
“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.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
― Joan Didion, The White Album tags: reading, storytelling
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
“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. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
― Joan Didion
“we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
― Joan Didion
“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
― Joan Didion
“. 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.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
― Joan Didion
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
― Joan Didion
“. quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.
Information is control.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights tags: alone, complain, time, whine, work
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
― Joan Didion, Where I Was From
“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues. character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues. character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The belief in our own resilience and strength can help us overcome even the most difficult challenges. It gives us the mental fortitude to weather the storms of life, to keep pushing forward even when it seems impossible. Of course, this does not mean that we will never feel pain or struggle. Endurance does not mean that we become invincible to the trials of life. Instead, it means that we develop the resilience to bounce back from setbacks and to keep moving forward. In conclusion, the belief in the power of magic, or the power within ourselves, can enable us to endure and overcome anything that we face in life. By harnessing this belief, we tap into our own strength, resilience, and determination. We become unstoppable in the face of challenges, and no obstacle is too great for us to conquer. So, believe in the magic within you and know that you have the power to endure anything that comes your way..
Reviews for "Finding Hope in Magic: Using the Power of the Supernatural to Endure and Thrive"
1. Sarah - 2/5 stars - I was really disappointed with "You can endure anything if magic willed it". The concept of enduring anything with the power of magic sounded intriguing, but I felt like the execution fell flat. The main character's struggles didn't feel authentic, and the magical element was underdeveloped. The writing style was also lackluster, with cliched descriptions and predictable plot twists. Overall, I couldn't connect with the story or the characters, and it left me unsatisfied.
2. James - 2/5 stars - "You can endure anything if magic willed it" had an interesting premise, but it failed to live up to its potential. The story felt rushed and lacking in depth, with the author glossing over important details and character development. The plot meandered aimlessly and the pacing was all over the place. Additionally, the dialogue felt forced and unrealistic, making it difficult to emotionally invest in the characters or their struggles. Overall, it was a disappointing read that left me wanting more substance and cohesiveness.
3. Emily - 1/5 stars - I really disliked "You can endure anything if magic willed it". The premise seemed intriguing, but the execution was horrendous. The writing was amateurish and filled with grammatical errors, making it a chore to read. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked depth, and the dialogue felt stilted and unnatural. The story itself was filled with predictable tropes and lacked any originality. I couldn't wait for it to end, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone.