dave cortel @davecortel - Tumblr Blog

nobody warns you that the fastest way to make friends as an adult is to just… play a sport badly with strangers until they’re not strangers anymore. should be studied tbh

the games are fun but the people are the actual reason i keep coming back. shoutout to everyone who makes losing a good time. here’s to more of this—more days, more months, more years of dinking 🏓

#photos #pickleball

thememedaddy

decenter yourself from your thoughts and start paying attention to the world beyond them. look up. notice things. become curious about lives that are not your own, stories that have nothing to do with you, problems you are not carrying, joys you did not create. sometimes suffering grows larger because we keep placing ourselves at the center of every experience. every silence becomes a judgment. every setback becomes a personal tragedy. every thought becomes evidence.

but the world is much bigger than your mind. there are trees continuing to grow without your permission, strangers falling in love, children learning something for the first time, oceans moving according to laws older than your fears. you are not required to make yourself the main character of every moment. learn to be interested in something other than yourself. read more. listen more. ask questions. observe. the less obsessed you become with your own reflection, the more life begins to reveal itself.

sometimes healing is not found by looking deeper within. sometimes healing begins when you stop looking inward and start looking outward.

#thoughtss

i want this hair back 😓

#photos

Someone pointed out that I always watch the room instead of joining the conversation, and it put a sharp, painful focus on a habit I’ve ignored for years. Because what looks like observation also feels like permanent exile. It means I am always standing on the periphery, looking through the glass at a warmth I don't quite know how to mimic. It means I've become an expert on everyone else's feelings while remaining a total stranger to my own joy. And maybe that's the silent cost of being the chronic listener—you spend so much time holding space for other people's narratives that you completely run out of words for your own. You become a ghost in your own life, present enough to witness everything but never solid enough to be touched. And in that moment, I realized that safety had been my goal, but it had also become my cage.

#thoughtss