Prolific Living

anna karenina

Revive your Literary Side

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I have a ritual with my books – first, to come into possession of book (through some generous source as I rarely buy books), read/inhale/digest the book, write a deeply personal blog post on book, keep book on shelf (if I loved it)/donate book to library (if I didn’t love it)/give book away to anyone who would take it (if one of “those books”)! The ritual, however, was more of a love affair with my Anna Karenina gem of a volume. I bought it well over a year ago on a whim and promptly nursed it on a shelf for months. I did not dare open it for fear of not fully appreciating a masterpiece by the Russian novelist Tolstoy until one day in January, I mustered enough courage to read this opening line.

“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

It took me one instant to fall in love with Tolstoy and one day to fall in love with Anna K. [Read more…] about Revive your Literary Side

Leo Tolstoy: “Anna Karenina”

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“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

With these captivating words, the supreme Russian artist, Leo Tolstoy, opens his magnificent masterpiece, Anna Karenina, and grips at my heart from that first paragraph until the closing words, 963 pages later. It is impossible to express everything I felt and experienced and learned from inhaling every word of Anna Karenina and yet I remain pertinacious to attempt so, a month after its completion. During this time, I have tossed one book after another aside, not because I found them to be in poor taste, only because it has been impossible to reap pleasure from lesser purity, lesser prose, lesser richness, anything lesser than Anna K. Reading Tolstoy is falling in love – with reading, with words, with characters, with thoughts, with dialogues, and with Anna and Tolstoy both – and finishing Anna K is that first love’s broken heart, never again will a novel touch me this profoundly, move me this deeply, and ache me so much. At least, I am sorely convinced as such today.

Reading Anna Karenina near Pacific Ocean

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Keys to Total Bliss: Fusion of 8 Self-Improvement Habits

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The day that I stop improving upon the self is the day that I stop living.

On a Rock in the Ocean in Hawaii

My problem has never been the lack of motivation in improving myself. I find myself drawn to self-improvement as bees to flowers or water to shore. No, my problem is bigger. It is the ever-present overwhelming feeling of just how in this world and life am I going to sufficiently improve upon myself. It is an obsession with self-improvement in more ways than I can possibly make time and effort to pursue. It is a sense of urgency to embrace life in its fullest and to be in my most ready form to do so – and for that, I need to living and breathing the better version of myself every passing day. [Read more…] about Keys to Total Bliss: Fusion of 8 Self-Improvement Habits