329

Exercise is not merely to improve physical health. The need to obsessively optimize every workout to lose as much weight or to gain as much muscle as possible is but a distraction.

The most important thing it offers us is a test of discipline—a test of our willingness to endure transient suffering for eternal resilience.

328

Impatience and a sense of urgency can only help you if you actually have power over the circumstances you want changed. Most circumstances cannot be changed, so allot the impatience wisely.

For everything else, be patient.

327

Indeed, our past experiences help to inform us about the probability of certain events occurring. But we cannot reduce our interactions with one another to a cold calculus of probability of merely how someone might act; we cannot navigate life making the crass presumption that every situation is always exactly the same, that everyone is always exactly the same, or that you are always exactly the same, when the nature of this world is ever-changing. If we are not vigilant, this mentality can malign our perceptions of one another to constant preemptive judgments that ultimately corrupt our ability to treat each other with fairness, justice, and temperament.

No amount of intuition can allow us to circumvent the need to communicate with clarity, honesty, and humility with others in conversation.

Yes—of course it’s hard. Stop being emotionally weak, stop taking lazy mental shortcuts, and stop hiding from the truth.

326

Time to rest? Or time to push?

Which is worse? Being crippled from exhaustion or injury? Or having fallen behind because of laziness and complacency?

We don’t know our limits until we actually reach them. Not only that, but the limit will differ depending on the day and the circumstances, and depending on the state of our mind, our heart, and our body.

There is no easy answer, and we should not want it to be easy because we perpetually need this tension between what is possible or impossible; it is all that gives us wonder, and all that gives us meaning.

325

The need to constantly remind ourselves to do the right thing—what we might call mindfulness—is only necessary because there are parts of ourselves that either we cannot change or, perhaps, should not change. We do not need to tell our mind to stop thinking, or tell our heart to stop feeling.

We need not transform ourselves and eviscerate our identity every time we make mistakes or go astray. We are who we are; there always will exist parts of it that need to be fixed, parts that should not be fixed, and parts that cannot be fixed. To live our best life, we must be able to discern between them with clarity.

324

In all the things we do not have gratitude for remains either apathy or bitterness.

If there was any choice that truly mattered, it is this one.

323

One of the greatest fallacies of the human mind is in believing that one step, among millions of steps, doesn’t matter.

Logically, as it reflects the nature of our universe and the cascading nature of cause and effect, every step matters just as much as the next—all equally inseparable, indelible, and inevitable.

322

While I have an extremely open mind, merely being open does not warrant desire.

When I have already found my own peace and my own internal joy, I stand to gain nothing from desiring more and more.

I should no longer be afraid to say that enough is enough.

321

Detach yourself from desire. You don’t need anyone. And you don’t need anything.

Remind yourself that losing everything you have now might be, above all, a relief. Remind yourself that you have the capacity to see beyond merely how you feel. Remind yourself of how far you’ve come—to be among the few to reach a point in your existence where nothing more that happens in this life is a mystery, a surprise, or a source of misery. You understand the human condition such that you no longer have to wander aimlessly; now, I can merely wander, for the sake of wandering.

But use this not as an escape, nor an excuse not to try. All this is to remind yourself to not be afraid—to not be chained to the ephemeral, to our tenuous, transitory definitions of what is important. Against all odds, you are blessed to have the right mindset, and the right heart. Do not let yourself, under any circumstance, let your mind or your heart become mired in trivialities and the banal; you’ve moved far past that now, and that is not what you are called to do.

320

What matters is not if you fail or if you succeed; there are often factors out of our control that determine the outcome. What matters is if you try, and how you try.

Embrace success, but lest you forget that you need to fail in order to learn, or to gain any amount of resilience or perseverance in your spirit. And if these insipid, nonsensical, banal, and vapid struggles are capable of deteriorating its integrity, you ought to be concerned for who you will be when the world has called you to do something that actually matters.