101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

love to create
PROBLEMS 
FOR OURSELVES
I think most people could objectively look at their lives and see how
frequently the problems they had were of their own making, their
suffering self-inflicted. We absolutely love to make problems for
ourselves, and we do it all the time.
We worry needlessly, we choose immobility, we resist acceptance,
we externalize our power, we surrender our ability to choose, when
really it’s up to us to decide how we react, when we change, what we
entertain our minds with. It’s yet another symptom of our own
masochism to say that we don’t have a choice in the matter.
And we do it because we love it. There’s something…fun…in
making problems for ourselves. There is something we keep
returning to. Whether it be because we feel we deserve it, that it
gives our lives meaning, that it gives us human credibility for having
been through something—anything—we want to create our own
problems.
Because when we are the ones who make them, we are the ones
who can overcome them.
It seems we almost stage accomplishments in our minds. We
subconsciously know that we’re going to get through it, but we
choose to entertain the suffering only to feel that sense of “ah, I’ve
done something, I’ve proven my own strength.” We make things
difficult so they seem warranted of feeling good when they aren’t
anymore. The more we suffer, the more something is worthwhile.
We craft our victories subconsciously. We know there’s no point in
fretting or worrying about anything: If something can be solved, solve
it. If it cannot, worrying and fretting will not suddenly change that. In
either scenario, it is pointless, needless noise.

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But the point is that we like worrying and fretting. If we didn’t like it
so much, we probably wouldn’t do it incessantly. It feeds some
human part of us that modernization has robbed us of. What are we
surviving? What is the point? Why, why, why?
Well, because when everything has an answer, what is there to do?
If everything has a solution, what is there to consider, or work
toward, or feel excited about accomplishing? Or rather, really, why
do we need to work toward something? Why do we need to feel
excited about accomplishments rather than what we already have?
What exists within us that is so unsettled that we cannot be at
peace?
I think we create our own problems to address the things we know
would otherwise become issues outside of our control. We make
them in ways that allow us to heal, address, fix, cope, and
acknowledge whatever we want to get to before some other
heartbreaking, external circumstance does it for us.
We create our own problems in the scope of knowing we eventually
have the solutions, so we can safely (albeit painfully) deal with them.
So really, it’s not a matter of not making issues for ourselves, but
being aware enough to understand what they are…and that we’re
asking ourselves to heal them.

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53
WHY DOES 
a soul want
A BODY?
Yesterday I took a shortcut while walking home and ended up
crossing through a small graveyard in the back of a city church. I
stopped and I looked at the names and the dates and the veterans
and the three-year-olds and loving wives and fathers and sisters and
husbands the immortalized bits of what their lives were summed up
to be and I thought to myself,
Why would a soul want a body?
What can a body do that a soul can’t? Why would it want an
impermanent, gross, heavy, hurting thing?
I was standing in front of a husband and wife that died in the late
1800s. I looked at their final resting places, a few inches away from
one another, and realized,
A soul can’t touch.
Assuming the idea that a soul is an energy field, that our spirits do
indeed exceed the speck of life our bodies provide in the span of
infinity, a soul can’t touch. It can’t see the light; it is the light.
It doesn’t know the need for human skin. It can’t run its fingers over
someone else’s hand and neck and back and it can’t feel crippling
desire and ecstatic passion. Those are symptoms of a madness we
call love, but it’s human love. It’s often shallow and wild and manic
and the equivalent of smoking crack cocaine. It melts into an
appreciation of something deeper, or it burns brightly and then it
goes out.
Souls can’t experience a beginning or an end, nor an array and
spectrum of emotions. They can’t be surprised because they were
never confused or unknowing. They don’t know physical-emotional
warmth or what it’s like to hold and kiss a new baby on the forehead
or the jilt you get in your chest when you smell the person you love.
Your soul can’t feel the cadence of reading your favorite book or
the sensation when your mind puts someone else’s story into your

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life, or how your fingers flip through the broken binding for the
trillionth time and how lovely that book smell is, especially when it’s
your favorite one.
It doesn’t know that crisp and comforting coolness of fall or the heat
of the sun on your back in the summer. It doesn’t know that deep
feeling you get when you spread your fingers out and run your hand
through water. It can’t wear your favorite T-shirt or eat cookie dough
or sweat or breathe or cry or dance. It doesn’t know the lifetime
comfort of your mother or your lover wrapping their arm around you
matter-of-factly.
A body is responsible for the most amazing part of anything—
physically finding or creating. Once we have something, we don’t
want it anymore. What we really want is to make and fight and
become.
A soul doesn’t have to pay the bills or go food shopping or cook
dinner or schedule a checkup or do the dishes or make plans for
Friday to keep up with a relationship. It doesn’t have to take hot
baths to relax or organize the house or run errands or take walks to
think. A body can learn. A body can feel the magic of realization. It
can piece the pieces together and understand. It can get lost so it
can be “found.” It can suffer so it can heal.
What if the series of rote tasks we want our lives to be better than
aren’t better than us at all? What if they’re what we’re scheduled to
do? What if there is no greater meaning than just simply doing them?
What if what we feel in those little moments we want to escape and
place in the context of a greater meaning is the meaning itself?
If healing is just acknowledging pain, then maybe living is just
acknowledging life.
There are so many anxieties and frustrations and terrible things
that cease instantly when we just say them out loud. The point of
learning to grieve and mourn and be present is only so we can just
be aware. Recognition is the remedy. It’s the only thing we’re really
supposed to do.
And the real suffering, the inescapable kind, comes from avoiding
what’s in front of us. It follows and haunts us until we acknowledge it
and are okay with it, even if it doesn’t make us happy. Even if we’re
anything but.

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A soul wants a body so it can experience things, and that body will
fight itself until it makes itself aware. Until it does what it was
programmed to do. Until it takes what it needs to take and feels what
it wants to feel, no matter how dark that seems.
We’re not supposed to be better than our humanness. Doing so is
overlooking the point of the body in the first place. We can choose
happiness, but we choose the full spectrum of experience instead.
Maybe instead of believing things are linear and the road only goes
upward and toward happiness, we allow ourselves what we choose.
We pay bills and do dishes and cook dinner and wonder why. Maybe
there’s no point to feeling other than to feel it. Maybe it just persists
because we pretend there is.

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54
THE IMPORTANCE 
OF STILLNESS: