In my quiet moments I allow myself to fully entertain my own thoughts. I learn and grow in layers. When I have come finally to decode what feels like garbled data and to understand more clearly what I am seeing, feeling and hearing, then I am ready to move through another layer. Some days, learning how to live feels like too hard a struggle, but then I consider the alternatives – living a hollow and meaningless life, wasting or even resenting life, living stupidly and blundering mindlessly along, living only on the surface, never letting anything or anyone really touch or move me is certainly no easier. When I consider the alternatives, it puts the struggle in perspective; I understand why I carry on.

The struggle is worthwhile.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
Marcel Proust