My Year with Eleanor

When I looked back, nothing was ever as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, it was usually better than I could have imagined. I learned that we should take each moment both more and less seriously because everything passes. The joyful moments are just as fleeting as the terrible ones.

Procrastination is the lazy cousin of fear.When we feel anxiety around an activity, we postpone it.

Just because you've done something frightening once doesn't mean it's suddenly not scary anymore.

A meaningful experience is a glass of wine. It needs to breathe and open up; it can only be fully appreciated when you return to it later.

The greatest thing I have learned is how good it is to come home again. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Fear is an emotional response. It manifests physically. Think tension, muscle aches, rapid heartbeat, sweating. Worry suppresses that arousal.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear, for newer and richer experience. —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. It isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Painfully, step by step, I learned to stare down each of my fears, conquer it, attain the hard-earned courage to go on to the next. Only then was I really free. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Having to face yourself and the guilt and self-punishment that comes from falling short of expectations—that’s courageous.

She taught me that courage is a muscle. It needs to be exercised often or it will weaken.

Here's the reality of life,' he said. ' You make decisions with imperfect information and achieve imperfect results. The alternative is to never make a decision and never achieve results.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

No form of love is to be despised. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Do one thing every day that scares you. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My

Jessica smiled thoughtfully, swirling her wine around the glass. “In New York, we can have the best of everything. It’s a city with limitless options. So we get accustomed to thinking that there’s always something better out there, because there usually is: a better apartment, a better job, a better meal at a better restaurant around the corner. We’re never satisfied. This city trains us to worry about the possibility of something better, so we’re unable to recognize when we actually have The One. Why do you think New Yorkers get married later than the rest of the country?