#229 What are you striving for?

On the days when I feel like everything I write is bad, I choose to be a writer.

On the days when I feel like the most inspired writer, I choose to be a writer.

On the days when I need to skip a day because life gets in the way, I choose to be a writer.

On the days when I don’t feel like a writer, I choose to be a writer.

And especially on the days when I don’t write, I choose to be a writer by trusting that soon enough, I’ll write again.

I choose to be a writer, not through pressuring myself into hardliner habits but through my daily commitment to the general direction I want my life to take.

Focus on making the majority of your actions and decisions align with who you want to be.

When you do that, you’ll always bounce back.

A compelling vision of who I want to be doesn’t just guide my present actions and brings me toward a fulfilling future.

It also helps me deal with the suffering that’s part of living in a complex physical body with a complex mind in a complex society in a complex, uncontrollable world.

Because no matter how strong my vision or purpose is, and no matter what I do or say, inevitable hardship will happen anyway.

So if I know why I’m doing what I do, why I’m going where I go, and why I’m becoming who I want to be, then hopefully, when life gets rough, I’ll react in a better way.

I’ll trust myself to handle the unavoidable suffering.

I’ll trust myself to minimize how much I add to the suffering.

And that makes the future just a little bit brighter for me, everyone, and everything around me.

Does a day end, or does a new one start?

Does the end of a book chapter signal termination, or does it serve as a gateway to an unexplored continuation?

Maybe we don’t need to arbitrarily mark endings and beginnings in lives that consist of an uninterrupted flow.

Maybe we’re just a tiny plot in a story spanning billions of years.

Maybe we don’t grasp the bigger story anyway.

Maybe it’s all the same.