Lullanotes

You can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.
― Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
― C.S. Lewis, 'The Four Loves'

I read the GLAMOUR magazine on and off — that is to say I read it when I have the ability to subscribe and starve off when I don't. In fact, I had let most of my fashion magazine subscriptions lapse for nearly a year, keeping only the subscription for National Geographic on my iPad. Recently Groupon had a promotion whereby you can get twice the amount of credits for what you purchase so I just paid twenty-five bucks for a fifty dollars credit. Not bad.

With that, I renewed my subscription for GLAMOUR and came across this final article by Louise Mensch for GLAMOUR as she leaves her column in a bid to keep it all within her plate for two upcoming books, a national newspaper column, her fashion blog, a spot of TV and her three kids.

Be a GLAMOUR girl in life. If I could leave you with one thought, it is this; you do not have to be like everyone else. Be ambitious. Intern. I did, and got a job in the record industry off the back of it. Spend Sunday afternoon sending out applications for dream jobs you think you have no hope of getting.

Don't slide into marriage with that guy you're seeing who you quite like and have been dating for ages, but don't love. You'll be miserable. The man who makes your knees weak and your palms sweat is out there. Don't settle for a roommate. Travel insatiably. Find cheap flights and go off on a whim on a long weekend to the cheapest destination available at the last minute. See plays. Network. Look around you, right now. Are you content with your town, your flat, your life? If so, great - if not, do something about it.

Start a blog. Read self-help books. GLAMOUR is not just about Oscar winners in golden gowns. It's about a big, beautiful, daring, ambitious life - the future is out there waiting for you to take it.

Yes, sometimes one can get a little deflated dealing with the everyday on-goings, particularly if 'everyday' is not a great day and why should it be? We all know enough that life is not a bed of roses, a box of chocolates whatever. Obstacles can seem so insurmountable at times and it's little reads like these even if it originates from a magazine, quotes you've come across from the internet, from Facebook even at the right moment right time that injects you with an extra dose of adrenaline to spur on and energize you to take another step.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Photo of dolls taken at an art exhibition in Shanghai, 2011

This initial experience will fade over time, but love will return again and again, in slightly different form. Emissaries from the same spirit will continue to appear before you. Each time you are visited you will remember. You are a veteran now. You know how love can come, how it appears, how it feels, and what it can cost. You know how powerful love is, and how dangerous, and how delicious, and when it comes again you will be ready. You are experienced. Here is something else to face and face squarely: This was a loss. Every now and then you have a loss and you pause to feel pain and sorrow and you keep going. You are changed. You're not the same afterward but neither are you ruined. For instance, even if you never see him again, for the longest time if you hear his name you will have a reaction. That will be your body's way of remembering ...
― Cary Tennis in one of the posts in his advice column