229

It is entirely possible to believe in fate and recognize the existence of coincidence at the same time.

Everything that happens to us is a coincidence in the sense that it all coincided with something else within incomprehensibly complex chains of cause and effect. Nothing is so disparate to be unlinked from reason.

But this is not to be mistaken with the belief in fate, for fate doesn’t merely ask why individual events occur in the first place; it asks why the chain of effect was designed to cascade in the way that it does.

228

Just as the same chain fastens the prisoner and the soldier who guards him, so hope and fear, dissimilar as they are, keep step together; fear follows hope. I am not surprised that they proceed in this way; each alike belongs to a mind that is in suspense, a mind that is fretted by looking forward to the future. But the chief cause of both these ills is that we do not adapt ourselves to the present, but send our thoughts a long way ahead. And so foresight, the noblest blessing of the human race, becomes perverted. Beasts avoid the dangers which they see, and when they have escaped them are free from care; but we men torment ourselves over that which is to come as well as over that which is past. Many of our blessings bring bane to us; for memory recalls the tortures of fear, while foresight anticipates them. The present alone can make no man wretched.

—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter 5

Hope itself does nothing to effect change; it is the hope that spurs our souls into action that ultimately brings about the change we wish to see in the world.

But if we can spur the soul into action without hope, then we can take a similar—but not the same—pathway towards change, only this time without needing to counteract an underlying fear.

227

In this moment is a choice:

To bask in the selfish indulgence of anticipation and imagination, of merely what could be,

or to make myself one-hundredth of a better person for another, before what actually will be.

And I will choose the latter.

226

You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

For every thought and emotion wasted away on the petty, the inconsequential, and the irrelevant, we are on step further behind on what we originally set out to do.

Our time is finite, and so is our bandwidth. If we are not going to think about what it is that we’re supposed to do, at least spend it on the things that bring us joy—not misery.

225

We are so adept at cataloguing our shortcomings, and so inept at realizing our potential.

To focus on the present is not to become attached to it; it is precisely to remember that we cannot become attached to it, because it is ever changing, and ever eluding us. It is to remember that we are in this moment is not who we are in the next. To embrace who we are is to also simultaneously embrace who we will be.

224

All that we observe that is wrong with the world—a living display of our own ignorance and complacency, compounded across time, generation after generation.

For every modicum of frustration that we feel with others, with the present circumstances, and with the status quo, we have to redirect toward ourselves equally. Not merely so that we can avoid devolving into hypocrisy, but more so because it serves to remind us that we have as much power to destroy the world around us as we do to make it better. And in every action and in every thought is a choice between the two.

223

The reasons to be angry with the world are endless.

And if it’s all endless, then we might as well begin here—with ourselves.

222

I don’t feel like it.

All the more reason to believe I should do it.

221

As humans, we are amazingly adept at recognizing patterns—at piecing together the parts of the puzzle, to conjoin the disparate fragments of our perception to build intricate stories.

Yet we are so shortsighted that we often forget that patterns do not necessarily reflect reality. We so often forget that in our subconscious, we would much rather have a story that is potentially false than bear the daunting prospect of uncertainty, of endless possibility that we might be forced to navigate.

220

Let us not squander our energy channeling our anger towards those who don’t know any better; channel it towards the actual evil in the world.

And in doing so, we can realize how little of it actually exists, but the true sources of evil are sparse not because they aren’t powerful, but because a modicum of evil taints far more than we might expect.