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We latch onto nonsensical notions like regret and brutalize the mind and heart by thinking we could have done better, when the stark reality is that we couldn't have because we were haplessly entangled in the fabric of space and dragged by the currents of time.

"How, then, can we break free from this cycle—this ceaseless chain of cause and effect?"

Indeed, it may be that we have no free will—that the course of the universe is wholly and truly inexorable. But whether we possess it or not matters less than if we can align what we desire with this inexorable course of the world—if we can interlock what we seek with what we actually find, if we can find a way to overlay a story upon the chaos and the void, if we can coalesce possibility with fate.

“For we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.”

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations