101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

there’s just
ACCEPTING 
what’s already 
GONE
All things are good.
All things are ultimately designed to serve us. All things are good.
I know what you’re thinking. What the hell? That sounds like just
another nonsensical platitude that you’re trying to pass off as a truth
that cannot possibly be true.
But what is it that makes something “bad?” It’s what we’ve decided
(or have been conditioned) to believe “isn’t right.” What makes a
feeling “bad?” We have lots of feelings—why are some good and
some bad? Some show us that we’re on the right path, and some
show us how and when and where we need to redirect. How is the
former better than the latter? Isn’t the latter actually more important?
Bad feelings become bad when we fight them.
When instead of listening to ourselves, instead of permitting
whatever feelings are going to transpire, even if they aren’t
necessarily comfortable, we fight them—the things that are meant to
serve us and show us the parts of ourselves that need to be healed
or the places in our paths where we need to take a turn, become
“bad.”
In the grand scheme of it all, good and bad are value assignments,
and they’re subjective. To a person, to a family, to a culture, to a
country, to a nation, to a race, etc. What’s right to one is wrong to
another; what’s good for someone is tragic for someone else. History
isn’t taught the same way in classrooms around the world. The
second you realize you can define what “good” is in your life is the
second you can start to free yourself. Because everything—even the

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hardest things to get over—can be good, if we choose to see why
they’re present, what they need to show us.
It’s a rare thing to love somebody unconditionally. The very basis of
love is finding someone who fills a set of preconceived conditions.
When the object of our affection doesn’t abide by them as we once
thought they would, our feelings begin to falter. That’s why the
deepest relationships become the hardest—someone fills an idea of
what you wanted and needed, and then as soon as they don’t, you’re
absolutely taken aback. You aren’t doing what I think you are
supposed to be doing; therefore, how could you do this to me?!
This isn’t actually loving someone. And the key to getting over that
kind of half-assed love is realizing that much of what we fight and fall
apart over isn’t a matter of whether or not we love someone as a
being, as a person, as a presence in our lives—but how much we do
or don’t approve of what they do for us.
We’re finicky that way. We say we want unconditional love and
happiness, but we don’t behave as though we do. We want love and
happiness when we get someone or something. Why? Because it
puts the responsibility of choosing happiness, working on it, and
toward it on something else.
The first step in regaining your locus of control, your embodiment of
self, is to permit all things. Allow the love, allow the loss, allow the
ebb and flow. Don’t harbor intention; just be. How quickly do even
our deepest troubles fade away when we center ourselves on this?
In the Tao, it says that softness is the equivalent of life. Bodies
stiffen in death. Trees that harden are cut down. Therefore, hardness
is death and softness is life.
When our hearts harden, when parts of us are blocked and filled
with unfiltered emotions, we’re forced to break them. The trees are
chopped, the bodies decay. Hardness can only exist for a time.
The brain has a mechanism where it focuses on the most severe
pain and blocks out all the others. It focuses on the hardest part and
forces us to face it. Even though it feels like we’re dulling all the
other pains by focusing and concentrating on one, we’re not. We’re
just furthering ourselves on the path of openness.
There is no such thing as letting go; there’s just accepting what’s
already gone. There’s losing ourselves in the labyrinth of the illusion

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of control and finding joy in the chaos, even when it’s uncomfortable.
It’s not forever. It only remains as long as we hold on. As long as we
fight. As long as we control. As long as we don’t accept what’s
already gone.

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75
YOU ARE A 
BOOK 
of
STORIES, 
NOT A NOVEL
Who you were doesn’t have to bleed into who you will be.
We often stunt ourselves by tying who we were into who we think
we need to become. We can’t map a trajectory for our futures
without considering what would make sense for the people we used
to be.
Realizing this was tying together three habits I’ve picked up about
myself, and about people in general:
First, we make problems where there are none. As though for our
lives to have meaning, we need to overcome something. Happiness
is something that we have to consciously choose; otherwise we’d
create the reality that we subconsciously think we deserve. Not
because we assume that who we are deserves it, but because
somewhere along the line, we were conditioned by other people (and
our own assumptions) to believe that we are only as good as the
things they said about us.
Second, we avoid things that are too perfect. We destroy them,
mentally or otherwise, if they are.
Third, we summarize in our heads. Whenever we’re about to make
a choice (about anything, really) we say in our heads what that will
sound like. “She graduated and started this job at 20…” or however it
goes. It’s as though our decisions can only be acceptable if they
sound right, and how they will continue sounding years down the
line, whether or not they are right for who we are in that moment.
But the synopses we spend so much time writing are for characters
we no longer are. You cannot always draw lines between what was
and what is and what should thenceforth be. You cannot always
make sense of your coexisting truths; you can only know that they
are both valid. And you cannot avoid good things because
somewhere along the line, the character schematic you outlined for
yourself doesn’t believe it deserves what you have.

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When we avoid—when we evade—we cap off our happiness.
You weren’t meant to be a story that plays out in a nostalgically
pleasing way. Life isn’t a sepia-toned flashback. Life is vivid and
changing and real and unpredictable. Unchartable. With no plot other
than the one we’re living in the moment, here and now. We don’t
even realize how often we choose our current experiences based on
old beliefs we are still subconsciously holding of ourselves. Because
what we think of ourselves translates into what we allow of
ourselves, and what we allow is what we experience, and what we
experience is what amounts to our lives as a whole. A whole of
which is a book of stories that don’t need to seamlessly transition
into one another. Which don’t have to be narrated the same way.
Which can be as short or long or staggered or confusing or exciting
as you want.
The point is that you are in control of how it plays out—but the
recurring inner narrative, the little voice that’s telling you the story of
your life, has to let go of the old chapters to genuinely write the new
ones.

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76
EVERYDAY SIGNS