Not everything you create has to be a literary masterpiece, which is another way of saying: it’s okay to write a list and call it a blog post.

A corollary to the above is that you are allowed to put your imperfect, unpolished thoughts into the world.

Often, what you think or how you feel makes itself known only in the attempt to articulate it. Hence it can be helpful to ask and answer for yourself what do I really think/how do I really feel about this?

Note: it can take a long time to figure out what you think, how you feel.

Other note: life can pass you by if you spend too long lingering on (3) and (4). A corollary to this: you don’t have to know how you feel or what you think to live. This requires developing a deep sense of trust and security—with yourself, with the world. Meditation helps. So does having a solid group of friends you can dick around with.

Most importantly: there are situations when you need to kill the corollary, to rid yourself of the contingencies, the edge cases. Simplicity is sometimes king.

Jung was spot on when he said that your shadows will rule you if you do not become aware of and integrate them. Mine manifest as: aversion to people who are too emotionally open, to people who actually want to get to know and love me (they might see the sides of me I have yet to accept/love/am afraid to show); fear of expressing desire and pain; fear of appearing dumb; fear of sharing my passions and incoherent, beatific moments; fear of being a “nobody going nowhere.”

The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. This includes your relationship to yourself, which might surprise some.

Poems don’t need to make sense for you to enjoy them.

Enjoying a poem requires a kind of unlearning, an undoing of the usual ways we read, i.e. as a search for meaning. Let go of trying to “get them”, at least initially. Better to relate to them as we do with songs—as experiences that evoke our senses; as incantations that put us in dreamy, associative, meditative, imaginative states; as machines that reorient us through disorientation. Find what I call your “personal entry way” into them, which can be a word, a line, an image that gives you pause. Let it plant itself inside you and spread like Rilke’s “tendrils of inner event.”

I am capable of hurting people.

I am capable of stupidly chasing people who don’t want to be chased romantically.

I am capable of forgiveness, no matter how long it takes me to learn and forgive.

Some people will sit with you in silence. Cherish them.

Some people will challenge you and make you consider slathering their guts on the bathroom walls of your most hated NYC dive bar—cherish them, too.

We need to criticize the systems we are a part of. But that shouldn’t come at the cost of personal agency, your life. You, the average person, are probably better off thinking about doing what you can, and actually doing it. This will take you much farther than reading philosophy and critical theory with others who feel similarly cynical and despondent about the status of the world.

It’s really hard to change the world (hence why people sit around and read philosophy and critical theory with others who feel similarly cynical and despondent about the status of the world). When you put yourself out there, you run up against constraints, the limitations (physical and otherwise) of who you are and the reality that you find yourself in. The kicker: humans do it all the time, and you are one of them. Go and do it, if you really want to.

In rare cases, all you can do is criticize the system. If so, do it well.

People will show up for you in unexpected ways, sometimes in unexpected places. Sometimes, it’s a tree or a bird or a poem that ends up saving you.

“NOT LISTENING TO POP MUSIC DOESN’T MAKE YOU DEEP.” —Via someone’s t-shirt in a restaurant I once ate at.

“Everyone is interesting, is interested in something. Make it your job to believe this, and to find that thing.” —Via a guy I met at a dinner party.

“The opposite of poetry / is poetry.” —Via a poetry reading at KGB Bar.

It is a fact of life that you can increase your surface area for luck.

You have a body. Use it. Move it. Love it. Dance until 4am at a disco in Bushwick, sometimes, even if “the loyalty of a habit so at ease / with us that it moved in and never left” suggests this is a bad idea.

A hack to starting conversations with strangers: “Hi! I’m Phil. What’s your name?”

Sometimes looking is enough. Other times one must heed Rilke’s words: “…there is a boundary to looking. / And the world that is looked at so deeply / wants to flourish in love. / Work of the eyes is done, now / go and do heart-work / on all the images imprisoned within you; for you overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them. / Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman, /. the one attained from a thousand / natures, the merely attained but / not yet beloved form.”

I enjoy guiding people through meditation. I do not know how to really do this, but somehow it is happening, and people are learning. I want to do more of this kind of thing.

I do not need to know everything about meditation and Buddhism to guide people through meditation, to walk with them in it. I do not need to be perfect nor perfectly knowledgable to be helpful to others.

My Dad wrote poetry as a kid in school. So did his dad. His dad also taught classical Asian literature, which was a surprise to me. See (21).

The world is beautiful. You are part of the world. Hence you make it beautiful. Hence you can make it more beautiful.

God is real, but probably not in the sense you think of. Corollary: you don’t need religion to figure this out. There is nothing to figure out. But maybe you need to try to figure this out before you figure it out.

Clarice Lispector is a genius. See: An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures. Q.E.D.