Running led him to the insight: “compared to what I ought to be, I am only half awake.” The experience he writes about here echoes the experience of self discovery we can have in the work of recovery. Free of the numbing and needy constraints of our delusional solution, we’re finally free to feel, to think and to look at those thoughts and feelings as messages for us to do with as we will. 

Danny’s survival depends on his ability to use the connection aspect of his shining to separate himself from the hotel’s clutches, not by denying the experiences his shining gives him but by understanding them and finding strength and insight from them. Our recovery is no different.

“For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream….the memory of Lothlórien shall remain ever clear and unstained in your heart, and shall neither fade nor grow stale.” -Tolkien

We are born great, but we have to accept that greatness in order to actualize it.

Gatsby is a masterpiece not because it offers a solution or a happy ending, but because it walks around in the chaos of this struggle, revealing the illusion of happiness that lives in consumerist society and the destructive trajectory of material pursuits

“The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav’n of hell, a hell of Heav’n” (I.254-255).

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within…”

I don’t think that Chris wanted to die, but he seems to have accepted it as his fate given the circumstances and his note. I think at long last he finally found the salve to his brokenness and disconnect. By sitting with himself in nature, having the time to reflect on his life and the people in it, he doesn’t feel alone anymore.

In desperate situations, people are always encouraging you to have hope. I’d never been told to just let go of hope completely.

“If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been” - Samwise Gamgee, The Fellowship of the Ring

“in this matter it would be well to trust rather to their friendship than to great wisdom” - Gandalf