jo johnson

earn it daily

@mtjack9 🫡

honor this one life you were given. a body that heals. a mind that learns. a chest that somehow holds both grief and joy without collapsing under the contradiction. this was placed in your hands. this impossible machinery. play it. pour everything through it. until the fingers ache and the music has emptied out of you and the instrument rests warm in your lap from the sheer fact of having been played by someone who understood what they were holding.

@AugustusDelano exactly

@josbjohnson Whatever happens, you prevail. What does or doesnt makes no difference. Yup

I do not stay positive because I believe everything will work out. I stay positive because I have been the man in the wreckage enough times to know that the man in the wreckage builds. that is what he does. I have watched him do it. he is me. and he has never once stayed on the ground.

@AlecHndez years of proof

@josbjohnson it’s what he does

@javocadosss exactly

@josbjohnson yes!!! Exactly why life is not linear and multidimensional

happiness pursued directly evaporates on contact. happiness arrives as a byproduct of a life aimed at something other than happiness. aim at meaning. aim at a mission. happiness will show up uninvited. aim at happiness and watch it retreat at the exact speed of your approach.

@Jayyanginspires 🤝

@josbjohnson Banger

I want to be so deep inside my own life that the living of it requires my full attention. no room left for the scroll. no room left for the comparison. no room left for the noise. the full attention demanded by the thing worth dying for is the cure for every modern disease I have been diagnosed with. the attention deficit was never a deficit of attention. the attention deficit was a deficit of something worthy of my attention.

out west

to live fully requires the willingness to be annihilated by your own experience. the sunset that brings you to tears. the grief that makes your legs buckle. the joy so total the body cannot contain it. let it overflow. the overflow is the evidence that you are alive at an intensity the managed life cannot reach.

the most dangerous lie a man tells himself is I already know that. three words that close every door the sentence was trying to open. the man who already knows is a man who has stopped receiving. and a man who has stopped receiving is a man who is slowly starving in a room full of food because his hands are full and his mouth is closed and the full hands and the closed mouth are what he is calling wisdom.

@BlondB00 yes

@josbjohnson yes

a man who can sit on a porch and watch the sky change color without reaching for his phone has won a war most do not know they are fighting.

@calebsloop 🫡

@josbjohnson and upward

onward

@AlecHndez foot on gas

@josbjohnson yup

becoming yourself is not the triumphant thing the books make it sound like. most of it is quiet and uncomfortable - realizing how much of what you called yourself was handed to you by someone who needed you a certain way, or built by a younger version of you who was just trying to survive the room they were in. neither of those has a clean origin. and they both feel like you. sorting them out takes longer than anyone tells you and looks nothing like a breakthrough.

the withholding man builds his own winter and then curses the cold.

chase it. whatever it is. the thing your hands reach for when your mind is not supervising. chase it with the full knowledge that the chasing may fail and the failing will still have been a better use of your finite mornings than the not chasing. the not chasing has a hundred percent failure rate. the chasing at least has a chance.