Not waiting for someone to give you what you can give yourself.

You will have a growing knack for gravitating toward wilder, wetter, more interesting problems. More and more, you will be drawn to the kind of gain that doesn't requite pain. You'll be so alive and awake that you'll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before you're forced to do so by divine kicks in the ass.

What worn-out shticks are blinding you to the blessings that life is conspiring to give you?

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil. Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination.

Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you'd like the world around you to change.... Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics.

Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics.