202

Being stoic is not being unfeeling; it is not rejecting emotion, circumventing it, or suppressing it from ever existing in the first place.

In fact, it is the opposite of being unfeeling; it is hyper-awareness of the feeling itself. It is confronting the emotion head on—enveloping ourselves in every sensation that it evokes—so that we can intimately understand why these feelings exist, where they originate from, and how it ultimately influences our actions. It is a way to disentangle ourselves from the daunting, convoluted nature of our emotions and see that our only pathway forward is to focus only on the things within our control. It is also in understanding that our emotions are not only completely natural, but are a fundamental component of a fulfilling life; it is all that makes life miserable, and simultaneously, all that makes it worth living.

201

Don’t go about life expecting that you will always have something new to say every day; if what you have to say is something worthwhile, keep saying it until it is deeply internalized within you, and those around you.

After all, what else can we do but keep reminding ourselves of the truth that so many of us need yet refuse to accept?

200

There are only two ways in which we truly change—the sudden jolt of trauma that shatters our sense of complacency, or the gradual molding of the mind and spirit through intentional daily commitment and routine.

199

The hardest part about change is often not in getting ourselves to change.

It is realizing the fundamental reasons why we chose to postpone the change we needed up until now.

It is coming to terms with the never-ending torrent of excuses we’ve given ourselves, the innumerable chances to do better, the days upon weeks that have succumbed to complacency.

It is to lay bare our stark lack of mental resilience and our obstinate affinity towards the status quo.

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.