Advice to my younger self:1 Start where you are with what you have2 Try not to hurt other people3 Take more chances4 If you fail, keep trying

The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.

Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.”~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive

From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.”~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive

True friends don't come with conditions.

The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

The highway of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

Be a team player, not a bandwagon jumper.

There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.

The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.

At some point, you just gotta forgive the past, your happiness hinges on it.

We love our partners for who they are, not for who they are not.

Explore, Experience, Then Push Beyond.

Travel is costly yes, but it pays dividends too.

If you didn't earn something, it's not worth flaunting.

Without struggle, success has no value.

There is no such thing as loving a child too much.

It’s the ‘everyday’ experiences we encounter along the journey to who we wanna be that will define who we are when we get there.

Successes are those highlights of life we look back on with a smile. But it's the day to day grind of getting them that defines the laugh lines etched until the end of time. Enjoy each moment along the way

There's more to a person than flesh. Judge others by the sum of their soul and you'll see that beauty is a force of light that radiates from the inside out.

Building bridges is the best defence against ignorance.

Anyone can choose to have success, but only the patient ones will get rewarded by it. Be relentless in chasing your dreams.

Don't live off your past successes or failures, live for the next big pursuit.

Integrity is something we show, not proclaim.

The only real certainty is that if you get to live, you gotta die. Live life now.

The funny thing about money is that you can't take it with you, so don’t try to.

Moments of reflection occur with calm deliberation and careful thought. Imagine the thoughts which would come to you if you would simply allow them. By giving intentional consideration to a situation, you will gain clarity which you may not have achieved otherwise.

His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot sustain the anger or the bitterness that brittles the heart.

There’s no matter here you can’t re-matter into love.

If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It's true; I've met children who've been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense – that they don't succumb to despair, that they don't demand a space for their pain – it's very true that children are resilient. But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn't break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn't mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wak of her mother's departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It's efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren't observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

Children who are resilient often have an appearance of a Teflon coating: nothing seems to faze these children.

I believe there is a hero in each of us. The best books are the ones that remind us of who we already are and empower us to embrace our own story.

Secure attachment has been linked to a child's ability to successfully recover and prove resilient in the presence of a traumatic event.

Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone...

Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.

Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework...

Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific...

... there is nothing stronger than a woman who has beaten her way back from being beaten down in the first place.

It's not enough to step in front of people's bullets; you have to be bulletproof too. You have to be harder than anything anyone else can throw at you, and sometimes you risk losing yourself just trying to save yourself.

One thing I've learned in life is that I can speak for myself, that I can fight my own battles. I don't like anyone telling me how I'm supposed to feel or think or what I'm supposed to say.

There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged.

Trauma can have a masking effect.

If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes...

Dig deep to finish what you start. Because no matter how hard it feels to push through adversity at the time, once your done, you'll own the experience for the rest of your life.

A Resilient Person do not need of good fortune.

NOTHING IS STRONGER THAN THE RESILIENCE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT. (found in an ad at Goodreads, but similar to the following quote by Bern Williams) : Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.

Our bodies are our vehicles of life. They are ours to take care of. If we aren’t taking care of them, they show signs of stress and wear. If we are taking care of our bodies, they show signs of healing and resiliency. A healthy body is an inspired body, and an inspired body is a happy body.

Life is a lesson that must never be taken for granted.

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.

Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.

Now, what’s stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history.

You are unfortunate in my judgment, for you have never been unfortunate. You have passed through life with no antagonist to face you; no one will know what you were capable of, not even you yourself.

When we learn how to become resilient, we learn how to embrace the beautifully broad spectrum of the human experience.

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space.

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

She had dealt with her pregnancy by wrapping herself in dreams.

The psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued that parenting has a threshold function: up until that threshold is crossed, the effects of a child's very early experience even out in the end. But parenting that crosses the threshold—abuse, stress, utter indifference—can sink in deep, especially if the baby remains in that environment. There's a lot to be said for this perspective on parenthood, not least that it offers well-meaning parents some relief from scaremongering. It also accounts for the astounding flexibility of the human infant: he is game for the craziest parenting stuff you can come up with.