198

Like everything else, to maintain balance in the world, there must be a limit to the amount of love we should give.

The thing is though, no matter how hard we try, we’re never going to reach that limit.

There are far more inimical forces than altruistic ones that pervade this earth, and far more circumstances predispose us towards hatred than ones that predispose us toward love.

Make it your duty to love as best you can in every moment—in every breath, every thought, and every word, and every action.

197

Making decisions is the easy part. If we can never guarantee an outcome, never fully understand the consequences of our actions in the long term, and rarely understand what we need in the first place, then the decision between several options—options that already seem right to us—objectively matters very little. It is uncertainty without recourse.

The parts we should be concerned about are those consequences—what to do with and how to react to what we’ve been given, how we let it shape who we become, and how it will unfold in the context of our lives. This is uncertainty with a chance to navigate our way out.

Making a decision will not determine our fate. But our reaction to the consequences of such a decision—does. Because even if we do not make a decision, life will.

We should stop becoming constantly bogged down by indecision and a fear of the future—this fear that one misstep could ruin the remainder of our lives. Perhaps it will. But the real indicator of personal failure is the deterioration of our soul to be stripped down to such a paucity of mental resilience in the first place, where one mere misstep is capable of destroying our experience of life. We are never ready enough for what this life may bring, but we can be humble. We can be vigilant. We can constantly remember why we’re here and who we set out to be. And that will make us as ready as we can be.

196

Farther along we’ll know all about it,

Farther along we’ll understand why;

Cheer up, don't worry, live in the sunshine,

We’ll understand it all by and by.

Whether or not we will actually eventually come to understand it all, the conclusion is the same: there are questions we will never have definitive answers to.

To pretend as if we know the right answers to those questions is haughtiness and delusion.

But merely to have faith that we have chosen the right answer? This is precisely what undergirds meaning and purpose in our lives.

195

If our only goal is to find truth and do what is right, then we absolutely must be humble. We must believe that we can be wrong at any moment, for any thing. To do anything else in this context is to become an obstacle to ourselves and others on the same path.

194

It may seem that since I believe there is no free will, there is no reason to live life.

But it’s not as if we don’t make choices. We still make decisions, and those decisions do indeed play a part in defining our lives; is is that we neither are conscious of the origins of those decisions, nor do we know what fate those decisions will ultimately lead us to. We don’t have free will in the sense that we don’t understand the grand scheme of the universe—the cascading effect of one event after the other.

So yes—we still must believe we are in control, believe that our choices influence the outcome of things, and play the role that has been assigned to us. It may be that our stories are illusions, confined to the limited scope of human understanding and emotion. But is that not good enough? Why do we consign ourselves to become dejected and disillusioned in the quest to find an ultimate truth, to understand the underlying purpose of all that proceeds through time and inhabits space in this universe, or all that exists beyond it? Why do we seek to comprehend things that are clearly beyond our understanding, let alone pity or lament our own existence because of it?

193

It may be that there exists an absolute right, an absolute wrong, and a universal truth.

If they do indeed exist, it is certainly not something we are able to attain, let alone comprehend.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a right, a wrong, and truths in the context of our own existence. If we strive for something—happiness, fulfillment, freedom, or prosperity, whether for ourselves or others in this world—there are right and wrong choices that will either further or hinder our ability to achieve these things. We should not make excuses for ourselves to circumvent the struggle we must endure to discern right from wrong by believing that they don’t exist. They do exist, and if we search arduously enough, deep down in our hearts, we intuitively know they exist.

192

Be glad—when wrong.

Be grateful—when suffering.

Be eager—when uncertain.

The more we can condition ourselves to embrace—not spurn, circumvent, nor avoid feeling—these indispensable components of life, the faster we can realize that we have all that we need right now, at this very moment, to live a satisfying and reverent life.

191

It is all too easy to fixate on a world comprised of incorrigible tyrants, of harrowing iniquity and unforgivable avarice; of a society mired in perpetual conflict, engulfed in a miasma of hate, ignorance, and blame; of a life filled with relentless suffering, seemingly insurmountable challenges, and impassable chasms of truth. And yet the worst realization of all is that we might just be part of the problem ourselves.

We can choose the valid answer that will make us miserable, or the valid answer that will make us happy. 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. There is as much beauty to be found in the world as there is suffering. But only if we can learn to see both at the same time. Or, perhaps, as one and the same.

190

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.

189

A key component of mindfulness is internalizing this delicate balance of patience and desperation as we approach every aspect of our lives.

For the things that need to wait, we have no patience,

and for the things that cannot wait, we have no desperation.

We eliminate possibility when we do not let certain opportunities or relationships in our lives pan out beyond their initial chapters,

and we also eliminate it when we let other opportunities or relationships haplessly perish and dissipate because of our own negligence and complacency.