I cannot teach you to be rich. I cannot make you thin, or famous, or more popular with girls. I don’t know the date of the end of the world, or what happens after you die, or six ways to make sure that your next dinner party is a complete success.
I can’t help you fix your car, or pick your next gadget, or make your teeth whiter or brighter. I don’t know whether we are governed by secret vibrations, or whether there are fates, or gods, or higher powers pulling the strings. I wish I had all the answers to all of those questions, and I wish I could send them to you for three easy payments of $29.95, now with special bonus.
It would be so much easier that way. For you and me, both. I wish I could offer you certainty, instead of uncertainty. It was all I really wanted.
Instead, here are some things I do know:
- There is a world around us and it behaves in more or less predictable ways. Every day the sun comes up in the right place, and each month the moon turns in her sphere. The stars are just where they were when I was a teenager. There is comfort in this.
- Love feels good, sometimes. Rejection feels bad. But feelings are just that, messages, not truth. You can learn to sit with them, you can learn to learn from them, you can learn that you can feel things and live to tell about it.
- Breathe in. Breathe out. You’re still alive, so there is still possibility.
- Our lives are constrained to different degrees, and what works for one person doesn’t work for everybody.
- Agency matters.
- We need both experts and generalists.
- There is freedom in being wrong.
I will be clear in this space, whether I know something, think it, believe it, or hold it as a temporary model. That is all I can do in a world that is provisional, unfinished, and evolving.