I have had, like most women, a lifelong preoccupation with my weight. My first published short story was a love story between an elderly man and a very young morbidity obese woman.
I have always found that actively loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society.
What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.
It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.
So go marry someone, provided you're equally yoked and you actually like being with each other. Go get a job, provided it's not wicked. Go live somewhere in something with somebody or nobody. But put aside the passivity and the quest for complete fulfillment and the perfectionism and the preoccupation with the future, and for God's sake start making some decisions in your life. Don't wait for the liver-shiver. If you are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will be in God's will, so just go out and do something.
I have a very simple mantra and it's this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music. That's my big goal. The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.
Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.
The preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people, and we don't get to really deal with the real lived experiences.
Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation.
I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying.
Your love for Jesus Christ and your discipleship in His cause must be the consuming preoccupation and passion of your mortality.
How tragic it is that so often we stop everything just as we reach the starting line. We must move past the narcissistic preoccupation with getting the love we think 'works' for us. The point of love is to make us grow, not to make us immediately happy. Many of us have forsworn the chance for the deepest love in reaching out for the easier one.
My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance. We'll see about that.
If you begin with the assumption of freedom, the preoccupation is always how to keep freedom in check, how to bind; But if you begin with the assumption of bondage, the preoccupation is always how to set out the word that frees.
Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences.
All of us in Quebec - and I mean all of us - have allowed language to become a preoccupation that works to the disadvantage of all of us - and I mean all of us.
I felt sidelined by the industry, by the preoccupation with finding something newer, younger.
Proving that profit is economically and morally justifiable, rather then the result of exploitation, has been a central preoccupation of neoclassical economists.
Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Your preoccupation should be on doing what you do as well as you can.
