Time & Perspective Quote by Marge Piercy

Act like self-regard is already yours, Piercy insists, because the performance can become the thing. "Live as if you liked yourself" is both tender and unsentimental: it treats self-love less as a breakthrough moment than as a practiced posture, a daily decision to stop waiting for permission. The line carries a quiet feminist charge in its refusal of shame-as-default, especially in a culture that trains people (and disproportionately women) to treat self-acceptance as arrogance.

The breathless, almost run-on momentum of "reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in" reads like an incantation against isolation. Piercy is not selling individual grit; she is making a case for continuity, for the stubborn social act of connection. "Bringing in" hints at community-building and resource-gathering, but also at letting yourself receive - affection, help, recognition - without flinching.

Then she pivots to the gardener: a grounding metaphor that detoxes the fantasy of endless striving. The promise is duration, not permanence. "This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always" acknowledges burnout, endings, and the inevitability of cycles. It also smuggles in a permission slip: seasons of tending are valid even when they do not feel like triumph. The harvest is not a reward for moral purity; it is the natural consequence of sustained care.

Contextually, Piercy's work often marries political imagination to domestic labor, treating the mundane as the arena where liberation either happens or doesn't. The subtext here is pragmatic hope: keep cultivating yourself and your people, but don't confuse growth with infinity.