Evergreen Reads to Empower Your Mind
The Standard Sister
Note no.27
Happy New Year
Dec 31, 2025
In recent years, the language of personal growth has become nearly unavoidable. Podcasts, books, gurus, and even AI therapists on Instagram promise clarity, calm, and a better version of ourselves — often wrapped in glossy platforms and finely tuned economic systems. Yet at some point, a quieter question emerges: what remains when the marketing, the shine, the sponsorships, and the economy fall away? When only the core is left, as in the past, one persistent truth reveals itself — we have the ability to choose. To choose differently. To change. The ability to pause, to observe, and to act against our inner autopilot is what distinguishes us as human beings, even when patterns run deep, fear takes hold, or reality seems already decided. As the new year approaches, this may be the most essential thing to remember — not as a promise of dramatic transformation, but as an acknowledgment of the power we carry. This idea is not new. As early as antiquity, Stoic philosophers argued that true freedom does not come from controlling reality, but from how we meet it. We may not control what happens to us, but we do shape our relationship to what happens. Nietzsche gave this stance a sharp and elegant name: amor fati — the love of one’s fate. Not merely to accept what unfolds, but to love it: the delays, the fears, the moments that did not go according to plan. Not because everything is good, but because everything belongs to the path. Happy New Year!
To Choose, After All
Article by The Standard Sister
Movement & Change
One of the quiet truths worth remembering is that nothing changes if we continue to move through life in exactly the same way. What does not move forward remains still — and in nature, what remains still for too long eventually withers. When we set ourselves a goal, patience rarely comes easily; we struggle to value small steps and become fixated on outcomes, on the moment when the change finally arrives. Yet nature — and we are part of it — suggests something else: results are not sudden events, but processes shaped by sustained movement over time. They emerge through learning, through experimentation, through the gradual acquisition of skill, and through the decision to respond differently within familiar situations — even when doing so feels uncomfortable or uncertain. To see a tree in bloom, one must first plant it, tend the soil, water and prune it, and allow the seasons to pass. Only then, in time, does fruit appear. The distance between where we stand and where we imagine ourselves to be is not a failure. It is a condition for growth — the space in which movement takes place. And if we learn to relate to the work itself — to the tending, the "waiting", the cycles of growth and decline — not as a burden but as part of the process, the arrival of the fruit feels different. Less like a reward wrested from effort, and more like a natural continuation of the path that led there.
Naomi Campbell by Jean Paul Goude, Harper's Bazaar,1992
Love & Risk
Love is one of the deepest and most extraordinary things life has to offer. The desire to experience it, to hold onto it, to give it almost absolute meaning, shapes much of how we live — the experiences we choose, the directions we take, perhaps even most of our decisions along the way. We often imagine love as a place of safety — which is precisely why we long for it so intensely — a space to rest, to arrive, to be held. Yet in practice, love is one of the most uncertain choices we can make. To choose love is to choose risk: the possibility of disappointment, pain, vulnerability, even heartbreak. It is the most elevated emotion we may experience, and at the same time, one of the most painful. Like anything alive, love requires movement — and above all, flexibility. Perhaps its most demanding form is the relationship we cultivate with ourselves: the way we speak inwardly, the trust we place in our deepest, most intimate voice, and whether we listen to it faithfully or doubt it at the first sign of discomfort. Remaining in love with oneself calls for patience and a willingness to sit with contradiction without rushing toward resolution. To love another, offers no guaranteed outcome; it is an agreement to vulnerability as part of the bond. But risk is not a flaw in love, but its condition. In this sense, love may be the most human, everyday expression of amor fati — the choice to embrace life as it arrives, even when it carries uncertainty. And yet, anyone who dares to love, to be hurt, and to love again, chooses courage as a way of life.
Philippe Petit and Annie Allix on high wire
Consciousness & Choice
Choice is often imagined as a dramatic act — a decisive moment that determines the course of our lives: moving to a new place, ending a relationship, leaving a job, getting married. Yet in reality, most choices do not produce a single, final outcome; they gradually construct a sequence of life as we choose to live it. The most consequential choice — the one that reshapes the entire picture — takes place within consciousness itself: in the thoughts we allow ourselves to think, the interpretations we accept as truth, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible for us. Most of the time we operate on autopilot, and choosing our thoughts can feel nearly impossible; yet, much like the small daily decisions we make — what to eat in the morning, what to wear, whether to go to training or stay home — consciousness remains a space where choice is always available. We can choose not to cling to a particular thought, to see rejection as a step along the way rather than a definition of self, to guide the mind toward what helps us grow, not what pulls us down. Even when circumstances feel fixed and patterns seem deeply ingrained, there remains a narrow but meaningful gap between stimulus and response — and within that gap, a decision is made. We do not always choose the conditions of our lives, but we are responsible for how they are experienced, and over time the thoughts we allow to guide us shape not only our perception of reality but also how we move within it. There is no single “right” choice waiting to be revealed; there is only the choice we make, and the responsibility to carry it. In this sense, becoming what we wish to attract is not a technical exercise but an inner alignment — embodying our values before they take external form. The distance between the life we are living and the possibility we imagine is not a flaw in the system; it is the necessary tension that invites growth and movement. To live in choice, then, is not an attempt to control life, but an agreement to remain awake within it — choosing, again and again, how we meet what unfolds.
Jasmine Trevanna (aka Yasmin the Fire Eater) , London, 1961
Time, Patience & Cycles
Most of the time, we relate to time as an enemy — at its worst — or as a judge — at its least cruel. In a Western culture that glorifies achievement, status, wealth, and advancement, the cultural calendar quietly becomes a measure of success or failure. Yet in antiquity, the ancient Greeks made a crucial distinction between Chronos, quantitative and orderly time — the kind that moves in minutes and years — and Kairos, qualitative time: the right moment, one that cannot be rushed or forced. Kairos does not ask how much time has passed, but whether something has ripened. Despite the many exceptions, contemporary society still tends to dictate when we should reach certain milestones — career positions, marriage, parenthood — imposing a timeline that rarely reflects our inner reality. If we can momentarily release the impulse to compare — where we stand on the timeline and what we have achieved so far — we may begin to see life as it truly moves: in rhythms of growth and slowing, of blossoming and rest, of motion and retreat. Patience with oneself, then, is not passive waiting but an active form of listening — the ability to sense when it is right to act, and when it is right to pause. Rest is not stagnation, and slowness is not falling behind; they are part of the rhythm that allows things to unfold in their precise and personal timing. Our efforts do not exist at the same volume at every moment, and sometimes work done years ago reveals its meaning only now. Experience, when we are willing to learn from it, becomes a tool that guides us toward our own right timing. All that remains is to keep moving — in a large step or a small one, in a leap or in a conscious pause — but always in motion within time, trusting that every step forward brings us closer to the moment that is meant to arrive.