I’ve learned that beliefs color your experience. They color it so deeply that it two people who believe different things but experience the same thing can end up having completely different memories of the experience.

What one person remembers fondly, another can remember as a type of suffocating. And if you try to to remember the event with a person who has a different set of beliefs, you will not come to a common understanding.

I’ve learned that you can work and wait for your work to become good enough to publish or you can work and publish the thing that is not good enough and then move onto the next thing (carrying with you everything you learned from the process). Both are scary, but one is a little more exciting and fulfilling.

I’ve remembered that I “live my live in widening circles that reach out across the world…. I don’t know if I’ll finish this one– but I give myself to it.”

You can choose what you see. (in fact, you do choose what you see.)

The most excruciating part of making a difficult-decision is the time before you make the decision— after you have made the decision, you’ll feel so much better.

I’ve learned that I find most/all emotions incredibly annoying because I do not like them. I tolerate them, but I do not like them. I like picking them apart in retrospect and saying, “whoa, isn’t being alive so interesting,” but in the moment of the feeling of them, I want to squash them into a little box, take it to SF, and dump them off of the Golden Gate Bridge. (i think this has to do with my control issues, but that’s an issue for another time.)

Speaking of, I’ve learned that you can do all the things that you’ve done in the past to work through a feeling, and still it will remain when you wake up the next day. So maybe, befriend it?