To stand and wait in Milton’s understanding is to endure, to stand firm in spite of hardship and to wait with the belief that this current suffering is part of a plan greater than our minds can fully comprehend.

As prophets in their own way, Abrahams and Montague witness and testify to the power in running a straight race, a phrase we hear from Liddell in one of his sermons in the film. Liddell tells his audience of the similarities between running and faith, and we see these parallels lived in real time in the lives of Liddell, Abrahams, Lindsay and Montague. Each in his own way serves not only as an ambassador of England to the Paris Olympics, but also as a prophet of the truths of life as enacted in running.

“The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one's own person, utterly and completely.” - George Sheehan

By nature and for survival, we learn from our experiences in life, and that learning is seriously affected by our warped and self-centered perception of reality. Our minds dutifully take lessons to heart that a healthier mind wouldn’t waste any notebook space on…

We don’t like pain or difficulty, but they’re part of life. We have to believe they’re part of a plan greater than we can orchestrate if we’re going to find the way forward, and we can’t do that alone.

The monster moment is different for everyone, and it doesn’t always spark a huge change. Often, it’s a quietly devastating glimpse of the reality that the self we see looking back at us is no longer the self we thought we knew to be who we are at our core.

This is recovery. Though Steve may not have realized it, he has been on this search since he first lost touch with the connection he was born into. We all live like this, searching for whatever means we find to recover that sense of connection.

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

I want to live again. I want to live again. Please, God, let me live again.

These are trees in their most true form.

The magic here isn’t so much the tree as it is the group of them uniting in their acceptance of the simple tree and contributing their attention in a group effort to love it and embrace their friend’s choice.

While gratefulness is the feeling, gratitude is the practice. In cultivating an attitude of gratitude, we act on the gratefulness we have in us.

The word ‘will’ can never be a statement of accomplished fact since no one can predict the future, but it gives us the intended action rather than just the hope of what the future holds. So when I say I’m willing to face a fear or willing to train for a race, it doesn’t just mean I want to do it. It means I’m doing it.

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

Your Babadook is the monster you can’t bear to face but have to because you live with it, and you don’t want to share that monster with another living soul because your suffering self already knows that everyone will leave when they see what the book is really about.

We deconstruct the monstrosity of the monster when we take the time to cultivate a real connection; so when we are able to accept the monster parts of ourselves, we can choose to practice a mindful presence with that self and begin the process of recovering the conscious selves we lost sight of while fixating on what we thought were monsters.

The waiting is the hardest part, because we’ve gotten a taste of something from a dream, but now we know the role of patience and acceptance. Acceptance is the waiting, the patient endurance of the hard work that true recovery, that life requires.

“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…”