Look at yourself. Undress yourself and see what you are. You are your past, you are your present, and you are your future. It is what makes you into the you of today. In the end, you are the sculptor, and you may shape a better future from your experiences. Be happy and secure with that ‘YOU’ that you see daily in the mirror. Be satisfied with that ‘YOU’ you have confronted and work to become a better person internally and externally.

Happiness is in childhood after all. The adult ‘you’ will recognize that happiness is not without chaos, thus the balance in life. And if you did not have that happy childhood, then you must create it.

This is what Antonin Sertillanges called “Intellectual Ecstasy” as is explained below:

“Every intellectual work begins in a moment of ecstasy; only in the second place does the talent of arrangement, the technique of transitions, connection of ideas, construction, come into play. Now what is this ‘ecstasy’ but a flight upwards, away from self, a forgetting to live our own poor life, in order that the object of our delight may live in our thought and in our heart?”

In the end, one must stand by their values with a critical thought. To accept when you are wrong, to be humble when you are right, and to be able to choose both sides within reason is a journey toward thoughtful growth. And to grow, decisions have to be made with strength of mind which stems from strong values being upheld.

And as Bob Marley once said “when the root is strong, the fruit is sweet.”

“The revengeful soul will always fail to realize the value of compassion and forgiveness. For it is never able enough to abandon such a fault; to retaliate out of pain simply because all of its focus is to make the cause of its pain, a subject or an object, feel the same pain as it is feeling.”

Curiosity is freedom. But for curiosity to work, one has to think and practice thinking, thus questioning or inquiring can come to fruition. To be clearer, as I am thinking currently, the bridge between the act and inquiring is that “lightbulb of connection,” that momentary pause wherein one says “hmph.”

One of my favorite quotes said by Jack Kornfield is “enlightenment is intimacy with all things” – the finite interacting with the infinite; the inner interplaying with the outer. So, if you ever notice someone in a state wherein they are talking nonstop without breathing, just listen, perhaps remind them to breath, chances are, they are in a state of intellectual ecstasy wherein you, the listener, are simply in that moment, the universe they are being intimate with.