383

All this chaos that perturbs the heart and torments the mind in this very moment—embrace it; let it tear you away from your complacency, and let it help you realize that you've been distracting yourself from your calling.

382

It is the most peculiar form of misery: to have all these feelings for you while also simultaneously being hyper-aware of these emotions, and yet be completely powerless to extricate them from my heart. And so I am forced to merely sit here—to haplessly endure this tragic spectacle, to watch this love, second by second, fragment by fragment, ever painfully slowly dissipating and drifting away into an endless, cold, raging sea, lost to the raging currents of time and circumstance. Because if I wish to not humiliate myself and not cause pain to others, moving on is the only right thing to do.

381

Love itself is never enough.

But love and fate in tandem? There is no such force in the universe that is quite as potent, momentous, and beautiful as this.

380

There are only two purposes of the past—to reminisce and to learn from.

If learning from it induces emotional anguish, then so be it. But if you find yourself in emotional anguish in the absence of new insight, remember that there is no greater waste of your life than this.

379

"But if I did have a choice, would I still choose to feel this way?"

378

“But you—you just know. You just do.”

377

There’s always something more important to be done.

But it’s not always the right time to do it.

376

Find gratitude in every failure to understand something.

If it is something that can be learned, be glad you have found an opportunity to grow.

If it is not something possible to be understood, be glad that you won't have to burden the soul or occupy the mind more than they already are.

375

There are so many things that we believe we can't be changed, but can be changed. And conversely, there are so many things that we strive to change that cannot be changed.

In each choice is a constant dance between gravely underestimating ourselves and being blinded by a futile idealism, and it's not up to us which one it will end up being.

374

Freedom is both an integral part of the human condition and part one of its greatest fallacies.

The sense of freedom is such an integral part of the human condition; in believing that we each determine our own fate, we can accomplish unimaginable things in this world. It is, after all, the magic of possibility, of what could be, that gives us an inexplicable sense of wonder and awe.

Yet the more that we believe we are each in control of our own lives, the more space for judgment and hatred we create in each of our interactions. To any reasonable being, what justification is there to bear resentment towards, to mock, or to ridicule them? If we are all a product of our circumstances, we need only to have compassion, patience, and justice with those of our kind. All we can hope for from this perspective is to create a better world for future generations, to be the change we seek to make—which then, of course, requires that we believe in our own free will.