Conscious choice is creative. Unconscious choice is destructive. That is how we end up living other people's lives.

You've got to make a conscious choice every day to shed the old - whatever "the old" means for you.

Despite all the doom and gloom that constantly assaults our senses, there is a way for us to ransom our lives and reclaim our futures: it consists in turning away from the world to recognize what in life makes us truly happy. For each of us, what that is will be different. But once we obtain this inner knowledge, we will possess the ability to transform our outer world. "You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself," the pilot and writer Beryl Markham reminds us. We cannot let this continue to occur.

Often writers cast their words out prophetically, as a sorceress might cast a spell, and many times when the words return to you, enclosed between covers, your phantom is so fully fleshed out in its own persona, you don't recognize your own creation.

The only person in all the world who can give you pleasure, or deny it, is yourself. No matter how much we love someone, the decision to experience pleasure, and to make room for it in our lives, is an internal one. If you are resistant, you could be around the most joyous people in the world and be miserable.

Remember, no matter what life throws at us, we can always bake a cake!

We think that it's the big moments that define our lives-the wedding, the baby, the new house, the dream job. But really, these big moments of happiness are just the punctuation marks of our personal sagas. The narrative is written every day in the small, the simple, and the common. In your tiny choices, in these tiny changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed.