There is healing in fiction that no self help book can replicate. Because sometimes you don't need advice. You just need to feel less alone in the experience.
The fact that you can read a book written by someone who has been dead for two centuries and feel less alone than you do in most rooms full of living people is either the most beautiful or the most heartbreaking thing about literature and I genuinely cannot decide which.
@yuuiichive@heero_time@danielarmands Just want to say that's not really correcting him. Some people don't pick up on signaling/indirect correction. The most compassionate thing was if someone went up to him one on one after class and just told him.
Since I discovered how to uncouple joy and happiness during my sabbatical, it's been a game changer. I may not be happy, but I definitely can have Joy.
And rarer, but still occurs, I can have happiness with little joy in the meantime.
Stay flexible enough to receive. You have not met all the friends life has for you. You haven't touched or tasted all the abundance the world has for you.