It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.