With the right arrangement of words or colors, books and films can lift my spirit and free my mind. 

There seems to be little if any science to this, and that’s why I edit my work until I’m heartily sick of it.

I’ve made a lot of offerings to the powers that be—soul-stirring appeals, fancy-sounding deductions—but over the span of time, the most widely accepted one seems to be competence.

I’ve been lied to by my heart.  I’ve been lied to by my head. 

I have never been lied to by ethics-bounded results.

While it may be annoying, it’s prudent to slog through complexity time and again in order to produce simple solutions.

Those solutions keep complexity “annoying,” rather than “overwhelming.”

One of the best defenses against micromanagement from others and life is, in my opinion, managing yourself so well that it becomes stupidly obvious that anyone who tries to micromanage you is destined to fail, for they will clearly look like an idiot to any observer with an ounce of sense.

This internally powered effort, I think, is integral to personal freedom.

The writer’s mind mustn’t cling to beauty or horror, for both concepts will be rendered meaningless if that mind rots away in a stasis-made prison.

If someone doesn’t study themselves in an effort to correct deficiencies, I think they’re almost guaranteed to continue running the same, obsolete scripts over and over again.  We’ve all seen people who employ the same, ill-fated approaches because it’s easier to do than hold themselves accountable by looking into the mirror.

In my mind, this is one of the surest ways to waste any free will we may or may not have.

Competence—and just as importantly, the ability to increase it—could possibly be the most valuable commodity in all of existence.  It allows us the luxuries of downtime and morals, and it is a formidable shield against personal pain.

I also believe that one who seeks competence across all domains can realize deeper teachings from age-old texts…without even so much as glancing at their pages.

Whatever model of reality I examine—eastern/western religion, science, philosophy—futility and abstraction seem to pop up more and more the deeper I go.  (From my paltry understanding of physics, time is a construct and if you invoke cosmological instances where it doesn’t exist, the idea of causality falls apart as well, meaning that at the heart of existence, things may happen without a cause).

The only practical solution I’ve found to all this is to approach life as if it’s a deadly serious game, enjoy the wins and study the defeats, and then when I go to sleep, set all these possibly meaningless rules aside, and bask in the miraculous mystery of it all.