333

We do not need to fight in wars to prevent wars, and we do not need to mindlessly give away all of our wealth and time, or to sacrifice our personal health and well-being to make things better.

What matters is that we do not take our privileges for granted and that we recognize the gravity of our action and inaction alike in the fight of good against evil.

If we truly want the world to be a better place to live in for us all, remember—however significant or insignificant we perceive each action to be—that no practice of gratitude, generosity, kindness, and love is without consequence, and, conversely, no practice of bitterness, spite, profligacy, and hate is without consequence. If we neglect this responsibility, we have no right to complain when we observe all the conflict, suffering, and death inflicted upon our world.

Enjoy the fruits of our labor, but never forget that the battle between good and evil rages on and, more importantly, that you do not have a choice to opt out of it.

332

If living with genuine, extraordinary kindness, compassion, and generosity leads me into misfortune, then so be it.

I wouldn’t have done it any other way anyhow.

331

Patience—your ability to accept what fate has in store for you.

330

So much fear of failure, of embarrassment, of loss.

So are you also afraid of improving yourself and gaining resilience from experience?

Afraid of shielding yourself from the opinions of people like that?

Afraid of learning to find happiness with less?

Be brave. Don’t let your mind be governed by present emotion.

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.