233

Remember who you were—so you can realize how much you’ve changed in the past.

Remember who you are—to remind yourself to truly live in the moment, is to allow ourselves to constantly change.

Remember who you will be—to inspire yourself towards a change you seek to make, whether in yourself, or in the world.

232

We all make mistakes—none excusable, and none undeserving of criticism.

We make them because there is no other way to explore the unknown, because it is inevitable, because it constitutes all things that we have done, have not done, and have not done right simultaneously.

Just because we learned from a mistake doesn’t necessarily mean that others need to learn from them as well, or that they shouldn’t make the same mistakes we’ve made. A perhaps disturbing theme of the human condition is that history repeats itself because we each need to write our own stories. We find it so difficult to extricate the things and activities within our lives from shortsighted calculations of convenience, from arbitrary valuations of time, and from an absurd quest to maximize our pleasure and minimize suffering, when what really matters to us is meaning, or merely the perception of meaning. Perhaps it doesn’t matter— or rather, perhaps it is the very point—if we make the same mistakes and create different solutions to the same central problems over and over again.

231

Lest I forget that the outcome of my actions is ultimately dependent on the world—for the complexities of this world to resolve themselves.

If I simply do my part—if I simply muster what vigor resides in my heart and in my mind to do what I know is right—there is no need to trouble the soul, to torment it excessively with the vacillations between hope and fear.

After all, what would I still do, if I knew I would fail?

230

”It’s entirely possible that beauty is its own reward."

—Seth Godin

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.