188

You’re not alone.

187

The individual that walks this life relying solely upon emotion becomes a slave to their circumstances, and the individual that walks this life relying solely upon reason becomes a slave to themselves.

186

In a world with pervaded by uncertainty, to live a life well lived means choosing to counter it with a blind and naïve sense of certainty and declare that we know when we don’t know, or to embrace it boldly and valiantly as an indispensable and integral part of this existence.

How lamentable are those that linger and drift in this world, stranded continually in limbo, neither resolute nor mindful, vacillating between the extremes of certainty and uncertainty.

185

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

184

Perhaps the largest disconnect between humanity and the universe it resides in is that we wake up day after day believing nothing has changed, when in reality, everything has. We are so engrossed into the stories that we’ve told ourselves, so captivated and convinced by themes, motifs, themes, and patterns that they are all that we see, despite the entropy and the chaos that perpetually pervades us.

We downplay the contribution we each make towards this ceaseless chain of cause in effect in the world; we fail to recognize that every thought, every belief, every action, and every word spoken—no matter how minute, fleeting, or transitory they may seem—has a permanent and irreversible effect on the course of the universe.

183

Mindfulness exists so that self-doubt does not devolve into cowardice, and so that confidence does not devolve into bravado.

It is the discernment to be able to winnow the possible from the impossible, to sift the truth from the untruth.

182

“It is what it is.”

Indeed, perhaps it is. Why fight the inherent nature of the world around us? Why bother trying to change what we cannot change?

But the only problem is that we rarely know the true meaning of what it is. The trap of this lazy form of stoicism becomes apparent when we consider the fact that we are often unable to reliably discern what something actually is, what we can or cannot change, and that we misjudge what is or isn’t worth changing in the first place; this is not only because we are pitifully bad at foreseeing and mapping out the consequences of our actions, but also because we repeatedly underestimate ourselves and excessively feed our self-doubt. Lest we continue to banalize this adage to use as a means of justifying our complacency.

181

I’ve always wondered what the sensation of unfettered empathy is actually like. If we were somehow able to condense this peculiar experience of life of an individual—the culmination of all the reminiscences, all the emotional trauma, all the disparate fragments of memories, fears, hopes, frustrations, and desires—and for just a moment, just be another person—not vicariously, as we might through imagination, but actually tangibly comprehend the incomprehensibly complex sensation of living another life. This hypothetical scenario piques my interest because it is effectively a cheat code to the maddeningly difficult task of empathizing; as someone that tries with all their heart and mind to understand the feelings of others, to experience those feelings firsthand would constitute an unparalleled, almost unimaginable profundity of empathy.

As much as I am enthralled by such an idea, I remember that this act of navigating uncertainty in our relationships—the very circumstances created by not knowing what we each feel and think—lies at the heart of the human condition. As much as we despise misunderstanding, fear contempt, and dread conflict, we must remind ourselves constantly that these are indispensable components of stories that we build together. For as much as we might despise the notion of conflict without resolution, resolution without conflict makes even less sense.

180

Some time back, I said,

“Remember to have hope, but also remember—losing it will do you no harm.”

It is not because those with hope and those hopeless face the same exact fate. The extent of our hope, or our hopelessness, predisposes us towards certain outcomes over others. The crux of the matter lies in the fact that in either case we fail again and again to reliably predict the outcomes, let alone judge whether those outcomes are good or bad.

179

In every moment, there is a chance to make things better. And every moment that passes with neither decision nor resolution, we are actively perpetuating the status quo, consigning ourselves to complacency and mediocrity.

It is one thing to merely accept the status quo and our own failures to valiantly answer our calling, but we should heap shame upon ourselves every time that we groan and lament the reality that things aren’t better.