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For the vast majority of my life, I’ve always run under the impression that our thoughts are free—that we can bask in the freedom of our own mind, that the liberty of conjuring any thought at any moment is one meant to be exercised to the fullest extent.

On the surface, these haphazard internal monologues, these whimsical mental escapades into the absurd, and these petty rants against the world that we concoct in our minds are all merely an exercise in that aforementioned freedom. It may seem that every thought is boundlessly free, but the truth is that our thoughts come at an immense, incalculable cost; I would argue that they end up being far more pivotal than our spoken words or actions, for the sole reason that such spoken words and actions are nearly always indelibly branded with the content of our thoughts. If there was any free will and any place to even begin to find it, it is here, through our thoughts. Indeed, our thoughts determine the color of our soul; they stain the fabric of our information space, tint the lens by which we view the world, and manipulate the spectrum of emotions that we can perceive. We must tirelessly remember that every thought that saunters into the mind, irrespective of how persistent or transitory they end up becoming, is equally capable of beautifying or destroying our experience of life.

We don’t have to have an opinion about everything. It can be just as it is; it doesn’t have to be something to us. If we decide to think about something, we are equally deciding to not think about something else. And if it doesn’t waste time, it wastes away the soul; the content of our thoughts is ultimately what we devote the heart and the soul towards, regardless of how disparate or paltry the portion of that devotion is.

If we are to be truly resolute in our mission—if we are to be the best version of ourselves to effect change in this world—we must be ever vigilant of both the origin and the purpose of every thought that enters the mind. To recklessly ponder trivialities, to toy with the insipid, to rouse the inconsequential, to burden the soul either with things that we either cannot or should not control—these are hindrances.

Remember who you set out to be. And what you set out to do.