Carlo Rovelli—
All Reality Is Interaction

“I close my eyes and I see the darkness of my grandfather’s cell. And I can feel the spirit of ever rising optimism (in the Sikh tradition ‘Chardi Kala’) within him. So the mother in me asks, ‘What if? What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if this is our country’s great transition?”

"For all my love of the human tribe, I find strange solace in the fact that, in the end, the rocks and weeds and insects will outlast us all. Mother Nature will triumph! But how grand it would be if — with that awareness — we could “uncenter” ourselves as Jeffers challenges us to do. How grand it would be if we could put the largeness of life itself, not our egos, at the center of our attention, care, and active concern."

"We live in an illusion that champions are fearless, and that any admission to the contrary is defined as weakness. While we need to believe that the extraordinary can happen and glimpses of God exist in our heroes  —  and believe me, we do —  my fear … my deepest fear … is when another seven-year-old girl steps off the mat because feeling afraid isn’t welcomed. Or because hurt isn’t allowed. Advances of young girls in our nation and the sport of wrestling itself cannot afford to see fewer pink socks.

There’s a stigma that only tough girls wrestle. There’s a stigma that only fearless people win. Yet here I stand in front of you. In front of our country. In front of the world − distinguished by my gold − and by the overwhelming feeling that all of my fears and all of my anxieties in that moment rolled down my body with every tiny bead of sweat, one by one."

"Though I know the world is carried by others who raise the torch of a question mark, others few and far who share our passion, it is still largely a very singular path. That is the most difficult thing about being a Muslim reformer — the vast loneliness of it.

When I heard David Whyte’s powerful line on darkness and being truly alive, there was a promise that I wasn’t quite alone in this sweet confinement. Here was this deeply grounded man, oak born of spirit and earth whose voice anchored me in the stillness and peace of a truth I felt so alone in living out."

"If you’ve been harmed by somebody, you don’t have any choice but to try to forgive it on your own, because the person’s gone, the person’s dead, the person will have nothing to do with you. There’s just no bridge there. But in lots and lots of cases, forgiveness is just a conversation away.

There are so many people if you ask them about the hurt that they remember from junior high or high school, what you often find is there was never any conversation back with that person who harmed them. And so the conclusion I’ve come to is in many, many cases if you want forgiveness, if you want to forgive or if you want to be forgiven, you need to go out there and get it for yourself. And the way you go out and get it for yourself is by trying to have the kind of conversation with the person you hurt that you want to have."