Chris DeLine

The other day I was sitting at the library, studying, when I got a call from a manager at work. There was miscommunication about who was covering which responsibilities and something important had fallen through the cracks. Several days prior I’d moved on from the job where I had been reporting to him, the ownership […]

“[W]hen a person experiences nearly identical events and reacts two different ways, then it is not the event which is of prime importance, but the person’s spiritual condition. Feelings come from inside, not from outward circumstances.” —Daily Reflections, October 9 There’s this guy at work who leaves his cell-phone ringer on whenever he’s visiting the […]

In a meeting yesterday, noting their history in theater, someone said, “As they say in my world, shut up and dance.” I’m paraphrasing, but it rattled me. As people were sharing their thoughts, the Daily Reflections book was being passed around, with the October 6 reading titled “Facing Ourselves.” “How often I avoided a task […]

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? […] That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.” –Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost Some time […]

“Never in our lives, long before we had a drink, were we able to settle for status quo. Nothing that was normal ever merited our attention for more than a split second. If it wasn’t better than normal, we didn’t like it. And that’s before we ever had a drink. So, we had better jolly […]

“Knowledge is important, but only if we’re being kind and gentle with ourselves as we work to discover who we are.” —Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection While an undertaking the likes of making a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves” brings with it a tremendous potential for self-knowledge, participating in such a thorough […]

“Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he […]

“Egocentricity is having a better idea about how this moment should be. […] Ego talks in terms of ‘This is right… This is wrong… I have to do this… A person must…” — phrases like that. When we are listening to egocentricity we have the feeling that we know beyond doubt how we should be […]

I heard someone comment on an interesting distinction last night, noting the difference between a renovation and a restoration. The latter is a reclamation of a past state, a return to its former self, and a way to make new again, while a renovation is really just the process of fixing something up. In a […]

“Suffering is the stress created by craving for more. Suffering is never having enough to feel satisfied. […] Suffering is the thought that I cannot be happy until I get… Suffering is the anguish and misery of being addicted.” —Noah Levine, Refuge Recovery With each return to addictive behavior there’s an implicit denial of self […]

“We don’t want to feel the hurt anymore. And so we numb it. And we numb it with everything you can imagine. But what happens when you numb the hurt and you numb the grief, is you numb the joy and you numb the light. You cannot selectively numb affect.” —Brené Brown, Rising Strong as […]

“Becoming becomes a denial of being.” —Bruce Lee A few weeks back on a trip to New York, I was explaining my elephant tattoo to a new friend. It’s not always easy to articulate ideas that have rattled around in your head for a long time, and admittedly I probably did a poor job at […]

Believed to Be Seen is a writing project I published in February of 2013, when I was twenty-nine. At that time, I surmised its aim to be that of documenting “my evolving experience with the American addiction treatment industry, and how I finally found my way out of its maze.” The obvious angst of that […]

From Believed to Be Seen, “When I was in high school a teacher asked our class to look at our futures and think of what goals we would like to achieve. Being seventeen years old I felt life would be complete if I could see some of my favorite bands perform live and own a […]

This evening, at a meeting, an older guy shared an experience he’d had earlier in the day. Reading the newspaper (which, as he said, is how you know he’s old), he was doing one of the word puzzles – the type where it provides the first few words of a phrase, leaving you to solve […]

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.” –Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost Embarking on any kind of new direction can be, and often is, overwhelming. A new beginning can come with fear – the What […]

It’s often said that “right action leads to right thinking,” meaning that positive feelings often follow positive actions, rather than the inverse. For so long though my thoughts either led me astray from what that right action really was, or they rationalized questionable action in the name of something “right enough.” Such is the plight […]

The first time I visited New York City was in December 2005 as part of a class trip. This was prior to TSA laws tightening up, and on the morning of our flight I loaded up two water bottles with vodka for our trip. I remember making a makeshift Bloody Mary on the plane with […]