I must not fight back

Amid great pain or great sadness, I must remember my guiding principles—to engender these thoughts in the back of my mind:

Even if all is lost, I know that loss is transient and fleeting, and leads to unexpected pathways in life.

Even if I have to endure a trial, I know that if something is endurable, I will endure it.

Even if I have to suffer, I know that suffering is an integral part of a life worth living.

I must not fight back against how I feel.

To be aware that it exists, and that there’s nothing more I can do about it, is enough.

Color

“The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny—it is the light that guides your way.”

― Heraclitus

It may seem trivial—these internal monologues, these whimsical rants, and these petty frustrations we have with the world around us—but, as I’ve always argued, everything we do in this life is ultimately a trade-off.

If we decide to do something, we are equally deciding to not do something else.

In the same way, if we decide to think about something, we are equally deciding to not think about something else.

Is this what my life was meant for? To ponder trivialities, to occupy my mind with the inconsequential, to burden my soul with things that I am in no position to change? I may try to concoct an intricate excuse—that these thoughts are merely for fun, for humor, for satisfying my curiosity. But at the end of the day, these thoughts and these feelings are who I am; they are what I intend on presenting to my fellow human beings and they are what I devote my heart and soul into, regardless of how much is devoted.

If it doesn’t waste time, it wastes away the soul.

Suffer, to merely suffer

For the privileged among us, the problem is rarely that the suffering itself is excessive; it is that we disproportionately choose suffering over joy, and that we suffer to merely suffer.

Suffering is rarely bad in and of itself; it is a necessary component of life. But far too much of that suffering is devoted towards obsessing over our status, legacy, and material possessions, towards bathing our consciousness in anxiety and imaginary misery, towards implicating one another in ugliness in the form of petty arguments, feuds, and absurd conflicts, and towards occupying our minds not with the guiding light of morality and reason, but excessively with nebulous and capricious emotions.

Everything must be in balance in this life, in this society, in this world, in this universe.

And to live our lives that way, is to live a life out of balance.

No end

Indeed, there is no end to the things we can suffer from.

But we seldom remember there is also no end to the things we can derive joy from.

In my mind

If in my mind, I know something is the right thing to say and I know something is the right thing to do, to feel guilt, to feel regret, to feel shame for doing it—it is all but futile, all but striving against the wind, all but an insurrection against truth. To endure the guilt, the regret, the shame—even if artificial and self-imposed—these may be among the bravest things I do in this life.

Toil and grief

Although my emotions have undoubtedly led me down a path of toil and grief, lest I forget toil and grief were, after all, my greatest teachers.

With, and without, reason

For those that live a joyous life without reason and never find it—those whose circumstances and emotional reactions to such circumstances consistently play in their favor throughout the course of their lives—may we celebrate them.

For those that live a miserable life without reason and never find it—those who are continually oppressed by circumstance and subjugated by their emotion—may we pity them.

For the rest of us who have found it, the choice between joy and misery—if there was ever a choice—is solely ours to make.

Farther away

Living our lives in a way that is aligned with the truth might mean that we are to live those lives always believing that we are farther away from it than we actually are.

To give up

In this society, we have a choice to become consumed by desire and become slaves to the drive of obsession, and we also have a choice to envelop our consciousness in a shroud of self-satisfaction and complacency. For many, the choice between the two is a choice between sanity and insanity, between joy and misery, between purpose and purposelessness.

But there may still come some momentous day where, regardless of what our choice was, we will be forced to give up—to give up our dreams and our passions, just as we might give up our luxuries and our comforts.

When we’re beckoned to do something far more exigent and pressing than anything we’ve ever done in our lives, will we heed to our calling?

Will we merely mourn the death of the status quo?

Or will we do something to make things better?

Loss

When I am at peace with the notion of death, why do I feel afraid of loss?

It seems that losing something—however better off we may be in long term without that thing—is somehow worse than literally losing everything.