Excerpts: “What I know for sure is this: we come from mystery and we return to mystery. I know this, too: standing closer to the reality of death awakens my wonder at the many gifts of life” (p. 16).

“[Do] not depend on the hope of results…[You]may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself” (p. 70).

“Diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites: they are held together in the paradox of the ‘hidden wholeness.’ In a paradox, opposites do not negate each other–they cohabit and cocreate in mysterious unity at the heart of reality” (p. 167).

“When we can say, ‘I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,’ we become more at ease in our own skins, more at home on the face of a planet rich with diversity, more accepting of others who are no more or less broken-whole than we are, and better able to live as life-givers to the end of our days” (p. 175).

Palmer, Parker J. (2018). On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.