On Goodbyes
Find peace in saying goodbye. Peace in knowing a chapter has closed, and life in that book will carry on without you, just as your own chapters continue without them. Find peace in knowing that true and untrue things will be said when you shut that door, and that you will have no chance to offer your side. Find peace in not needing to.
On Choices
You always have a choice: to create or to hold back, to accept the outcome or resent it. You may not choose what you receive, but always what you give. Not how you’re treated, but always how you respond. Not where life takes you, but what you express in that place.
Your mindset and perspective are always yours to command. So how come you often say “I don’t have a choice”?
On Being Unafraid
Fear imagines the obstacle, magnifies it, and then declares it victorious. That’s why fear cripples, but only if you let it breathe. When you choose the opposite—to name your fear and lay it bare, to hear the thoughts it whispers and the stories it spins—and acknowledge them as possibilities, not certainties, fear loses its grip. Remember that what is certain is only this moment, and in it, you are unafraid. This state is not the absence of fear. It is really the constructive management of it.
On the Unknown
Embrace the unknown. Trust may be hard to offer, but can you try an embrace? Understand that not knowing what will be written on the sands after the wave gives the possibility for anything and everything to be your story, including the surpassing of your wildest dreams. Therefore, approach the unknown with openness, one day at a time. Let the lack of certainty fill you with excited expectation, not trepidation.
On Love
It really is everything. Simple as it is, you cannot fully wear this cloak—or it would never quite fit—until you have searched yourself and are ready to be a child again. Ready to give and serve and share and believe. Love is one of those things that are far less arbitrary than they seem, and far more common than we recognize.
On Life and Its Lemons
Sometimes, your plans will not unfold as you wish, your heart will get broken, and you will encounter closed doors that you wished with all your heart would open. Normalize this—the possibility of not always winning. Remember, you are mortal. And no matter how endowed a mortal you are, you cannot play the world from the palm of your hand. You will always only be another player on the board, an exceptional one, perhaps, but still a player. And being a player has its limitations. So normalize life happening in ways outside your design. Such happenings are a part of the world; not its end. Don’t make them the end of your own world.
On Not Winning
There is a timeless cycle in loss—you will feel it, more than once. When that loved one, loved chance, or loved prize slips through your hands, you will know denial, bargaining, anger, sorrow, and, hopefully, acceptance. This is the way of being human. Recognize and empathize with this humanity in yourself and others. Ours is a species that feels. This makes you. This makes others. This makes all of us.
On Living
Life is for the living. (Well, also for memories of the dead). But for you, a part of the living, life is experienced in the present—where things can be felt, changed, and cherished. When you live in the past—where things can only be remembered, unaltered, and unchangeable—when you live in that oblivion, you are a living dead. But death is something whose time is still coming; why not wait until then to indulge the past? It will be a long time in the grave. While you’re still here, remember that now is for living in the present and now is for life.
