236

I would rather be condemned for saying something wrong than live with the shame of not saying what needed to be said.

If I was wrong, there is an opportunity for me to learn.

If I was right, there is an opportunity for everyone else to learn.

If I say nothing, all I do is display my lack of courage and awareness.

235

I perpetually underestimate myself, always downplaying how far I’ve come and all that I’ve achieved in this live thus far. I give credit to others, I forgive them, and I love them, even when they don’t deserve it.

It takes a conscious decision for me to take more pride in who I am and in what I do, and to judge others when they need to be judged.

As more time goes on, as I let myself be relegated to a condition of life I can’t thrive in, whether due to my own vices or due to others taking advantage of me, I’m realizing that I need to make this conscious decision more often than I might presume.

234

At times I feel some semblance of shame—some fragment of thought in my mind, afraid that I might be judged for thinking seriously about my life and my actions, and the values I stand for.

The phrase “taking life too seriously” has garnered far too much of a negative connotation in our contemporary conversations; the profligate focus on happiness at the core of the human condition, on the path of least resistance, on blissful ignorance and the self-centeredness that pervades our culture blinds us to the very real suffering endured by countless others in this journey with us on this earth. For them, there is no option but to take life seriously.

No—I don’t want to say sorry later. I don’t want to have to apologize for not doing my due diligence, for not heeding to my calling, for turning my head away at the face of injustice, for succumbing to complacency. I will take life as seriously as I want to. And for as much as I can enjoy it myself, I know very well the day will come when this bubble—this insular and fragile world we live in—will burst.

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.