Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience - ensuring we'll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.

There's no evidence that vulnerabilty is weakness.

We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

It's about showing up. And sometimes I don't do it. I almost always regret it, but sometimes I don't do it. Sometimes I walk into a situation where I'm intimidated and I want to be liked and I want to fit in, and I don't choose authenticity. And it's always pretty miserable.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.

To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.