356

Whether you do it or don’t do it doesn’t matter; there is an unknown opportunity lost no matter which path you take. What is problematic is that you vacillate between the two—that you conjure this senseless rift between the mind and heart. If you desire something, and it is appropriate in the given circumstances, then just set out to do it—with courage, with determination, and with resolution.

355

What is a need and what is merely a desire?

Desires are reducible to a root desire, and needs are context-dependent, particularly as they relate to those same root desires. We cannot need anything without first having a desire; after all, without desire, without something to orient our spirit towards, what are we but atoms floating around in this universe? We only need things as they pertain to what we desire to see in the world, in others, or in ourselves.

The truth is most of us merely desire to belong, to be part of a community where we can make a difference, all while having our basic needs for food, water, and shelter; far less important to us is how that all exactly looks like, so as long as those conditions are met. We tack on so many abstractions—so many layers of semantics, and so many arbitrary goals, so many fabricated inadequacies and so many solutions to problems that we created in the first place—that we so easily forget just how little we need, as Marcus Aurelius puts it, to live a satisfying and reverent life.

354

Why do you castigate yourself for failing, especially if you’ve already tried your best? Why didn’t you castigate yourself for wasting away your thoughts on the petty and the inconsequential? Not only that, why did you let your mind and your soul become imbued by such things?

If you’re going to blame yourself, at least blame yourself fairly.

353

Work is the expression of our energy and our dreams. We owe those along for the journey the same dignity and connection we would like to receive in return.

— Seth Godin, Song of Significance

You've found the place to make a difference. So make it.

352

The most selfish thing you could do is not heed to the very advice you would give someone else in your same position. You are not an exception to the truth; you should be the exemplar of it.

Remember that. And remember your calling.

351

Work is not a means to live life; it is your life.

A majority of our waking hours are spent at work, so why squander it and why sabotage ourselves with the presumption that there must be a hard boundary between work and personal life? So often it is perceived as only a means of making money or gaining status so that we can do something else that might fulfill us (and we often fail at finding something else anyway). And so we keep postponing our happiness, we keep delaying our search for meaning and purpose, and we keep making excuses on why right now isn’t the right time to make a difference.

So many of us have been blessed to have already found something to do, and if your hand has found something to do, then do it will all of your heart. The people around you depend on it; if you don’t believe that, then you relinquish the right to complain when your workplace, your community, and your country, or humanity as a whole, isn’t the way you wanted it to be. We are each as much of the problem as we are part of the potential solution.

350

The practice of stoicism does not imply an absence of emotions; if anything, it implies an overabundance of emotion.

It is only valuable for those that require some means to navigate this world without having their minds crushed by the constant negative emotion that generated from the weight of their circumstances.

349

You just have to keep going; it’s the only way time will be on your side.

348

I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

We are as much feeling beings as we are thinking beings.

For as much as reason can save us from demise, from the waywardness of our circumstances and our emotions, it can, in its obstinance and confinement within its own system, just as easily hinder the will to change and to adapt, or worse, shield us from what could be our richest and most profound experiences or realizations in this life.

347

Always hope over fear.

We can’t predict the future anyway, so we might as well not be miserable in the meanwhile.