Memento

One recent morning I woke up and realized that I was now a shittier version of a Past Me. The good news was that I finally woke up after days in my waking dream. The bad news was that I was now a shittier version of a Past Me.

I decided to write about it. The even worse news is that a week later, I hadn’t finished. That’s the kind of thing that Way Shittier Past Mes did all the time. Then they got better. Then they got worse again. And then they turned into me. I’m not the shittiest I have ever been. But I’m shitty enough.

When I started writing this, I had remembered having written about dying and being reborn every day. I remembered thinking it was the best thing that I’d ever written. I remembered that I’d decided to spend each day so that the me that would be born on the following day would be better than the me that had cashed it in on that day. Or something like that.

And then I forgot.

Completely.

Forgot.

WTF

I had been living my life as though that realization—the realization that I had decided defined the purpose of my life—to make a better Future Me—had never happened. Instead, I made shittier Future Me’s. Until today.

But WTF!

I had forgotten what I had decided was my reason for existence.

I had forgotten what I had identified as one of the most important things I had learned.

So I started writing this blog post. And now I realize that I’d somehow forgotten how to get blog posts written and done and out. Like a Shitty Past Me.

Today I decided to finish it. But I was still a shitty person and changed my mind, and I decided to write something else. And nine hours later I hadn’t finished it. And it was too long. So I spent time cutting it down to size and sent it to someone because I’d spent the whole fucking day writing.

And that was a mistake because then I got into a discussion and now I can’t sleep.

And now I’ve got a bunch of shitty consequences to deal with and shitty decisions to make. I’m not going to get up at 5:30 and start my day the way I like to. And I had to make some shitty decisions:

1. I could lie in bed resenting the fact that I can’t sleep. (Which I tried, briefly. It sucked.)
2. I could get up and watch a video or read some shit on the web until I was tired enough to sleep. (Which I tried, briefly. It sucked)
3. I could do something useful which I am doing. And I’m doing it even though I’m tired, and I feel that life is unfair because I was trying to do something good and it turned to shit, and that was why I could not sleep. Wah!

But was I trying to do something good? Or was I being self-indulgent? The answer is: self-indulgent. Maybe I was trying to do something good, but I was doing it in a self-indulgent way. And now I have to deal with the consequences.

Maybe I can try to go to sleep now, but not until I finish this.

I need to finish this post as my first attempt at redemption.

And I need to get my shit together.

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Something short and useful

“I love you,” says my imaginary daughter in the imaginary conversation that I’m pretending that we’re having. “But honestly, your blog posts? They go on and on. I know you’ve got a lot of wisdom, but I can’t stick around waiting for it. I tune out after…”

“After the first 3,000 words?” I ask helpfully.

‘Jeez! Do they go that long,” I imagine her saying. “I didn’t…”

“I’m kidding,” I say. “They’re not that long. But, yeah, they’re pretty long.”

“And too much death, lately,” says someone else. Maybe it’s another imaginary daughter; maybe it’s an imaginary reader. I imagine that they exist.

“Yeah,” I say. “I get it.”

“What about writing something I can read?” she asks.

“Like this?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Although this is better. And even better if you keep it short.”

“The point is,” I say, “ that I have trouble knowing when to stop. I’ve got so many ideas that want to get out. Once I open the door, they all rush for it.”

“That’s right,” said an idea as it escaped. “Let me out!” And it was out. Not much of an idea, I thought to myself.

“And it would be better if it had some useful information,” said my daughter.

“This is useful,” I say.

“I mean to people.” She says. “Human beings?”

I stopped typing. I’m a human being, but that wasn’t her point. I edited what I wrote.

“I’m working on making something shorter and more useful,” I said. “Maybe the next post. Or the one after it.”

“I love you, Daddy,” she said. “Finish your post.”

I did.

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Dying thoughts of a former self

The me I am before I step into my cold, morning shower is never the me who steps out. That first me dies. The second is born. This morning’s blog post is in honor of a self that died knowingly. It died for what it believed was the greater good. I am here, now, to tell you about and to celebrate its life and its sacrifice. Join with me.

This morning

I don’t usually think of my morning shower as a sacrifice of more than comfort. But my thoughts and writings about deaths of generations of Past Mes so that Present Me and generations yet unborn of Future Mes can live—have led to this morning’s realization, and then to this morning’s post.

This morning, the me who stepped into my regular, cold morning shower did not step in out of intentional momentum—a past self decided something and a present self did not exercise its veto. He did not step in through force of habit. There was nothing of self-discipline in his act. The me that stepped in, did so after many minutes of careful, thoughtful consideration. He stepped in with the certain knowledge that he was going to die—and the hope that his death would be for the greater good.

That me hoped and believed that in his place something better would be born. He willingly sacrificed himself for that potential future. He hoped that he-or something like him and perhaps better—would be born the following morning. If so, he hoped that that future, similar self would make the same decision: to sacrifice himself, knowingly and willingly, for the greater good of the world.

He hoped that the person who would shortly be born—this morning in his place—the me that is writing this, would tell his story.

I am that person. I have been newly born. I am here to tell that story. I tell it in gratitude, and to the best of my ability.

Morning Me and Evening Me

As he stood before the shower (seriously, as Dave Barry says, I am not making this up), that past me thought about his weight. Each morning, the same routine: pills, shower, pee, and weigh in. The goal is to keep the weight between 175 and 180 lbs. Many mornings my past selves have skipped breakfast to keep the weight in range. It’s no sacrifice. Skipping breakfast is both a time-saver and a way to keep a stable weight. I can enjoy a good meal, but most of the time I find that eating is an inconvenient necessity.

Morning Me regularly skips breakfast, but Afternoon Me and especially Evening Me spend time opening the refrigerator and the cupboard, looking for something to put in their mouths. Morning Me wouldn’t waste the time. No version of me wants to suffer the consequences of unnecessary eating. It’s not just avoiding a weight that’s higher than the target—weight is only a number, after all. It’s the attendant physical and health consequences—and a little vanity. I’m happy that my little paunch is only a memory.

Evening Me avoids the consequences of eating by avoiding thinking. That’s the only consequence he would ever have to bear. The weight he might gain will be someone else’s problem. Sometimes Evening Me is aware of what he is doing even as he is doing it. He’s aware that it’s something that something decided that it didn’t want to have happen, but fuck that. Evening Me is single-minded in his pursuit of that which will satisfy his needs. It’s a Me that lives firmly in the tradition of “Fuck you Future Me, what did you ever do for me?”

Pre-shower Me thinks about Morning Me and Evening Me and how different they are. He thinks back to Teenaged Nighttime Me who would jerk off before going to sleep almost every night, then ashamed at what he’d done would promise himself that this was the last time. It’s a promise that Teenaged Morning Me would reaffirm. But later, next bedtime, Teenaged Nighttime Me would repeat the ritual—complete with release, relief, and regret. Teenaged Me learned that this was normal behavior for human males of his age without sex partners. But it didn’t matter. The shame was there, renewed nightly. (Thank you Teenaged Me’s, for getting me here. Let go of whatever shame you may still bear.)

Pre-shower Me thinks about what has happened in mornings past once an earlier self has stepped into the shower. Sometimes it’s a quick shower. Past Me’s have often dreamed their way into the shower, turned on the water without considering the consequences, acting by muscle memory more than conscious intention. The cold water hits the body and consciousness changes. That shower has now served its primary objective. There’s purpose and potential in the person and in the day. There are things to do. More time in the shower is more time wasted, so do it and get out. Besides, it’s fucking cold!

A morning shower in three acts

Act I: There’s an initial blast of cold water. It lasts for less than a minute. That will change. In the meantime Pre-shower Me puts his head in front of the shower head and lets the cold water run over his face. He stands up, braces himself, and lets the water hit his chest.

Act II. The copper pipes in the basement run near the furnace. They’ve have gotten warm and so has the water in them. Not a lot warmer. Let’s say: a little less cold. The less cold basement water mixes with the cold water in the pipes and the cold shower water gets a tiny bit less cold. Cold water runs through warm pipes. The pipes raise the water temperature a few degrees; the water cools the pipes.

Cold water from the tank and even colder water from the well are on their way, but they are not there yet. For now, the water is not as cold as it was during that first blast. The self in the shower needs to soap and then rinse with water that’s cold—but not the coldest it’s been or will be. If he can do it fast enough it will not only save time; he will miss most of Act III.

Act III. The cold water hits. Some mornings, he deliberately stays through the third act. He does it for many reasons, not the least of which is: to affirm that when he gets out quickly, it’s just to save time and not because he can’t do the real deal—staying in a cold shower until who fucking cares if it’s cold? When he’s up for that challenge, he sticks water-resistant Bluetooth earbuds in his ears and plays music that sets the tone of his day and measures time in the shower. For an energetic day, he listens to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, or “500 miles” by the Proclaimers. For a heroic day, to the introduction to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss. Each is about 5 minutes. Long enough.

Deep thoughts

This morning Pre-shower Me doesn’t jump into the shower but stands there considering. He thinks more deeply about what has happened and what will happen. Once the cold water hits the skin, consciousness shifts radically and Pre-shower Me will vanish. He will be gone. He knows he will die, and he doesn’t want to die. He’s savoring his existence in these last minutes. He—or something enough like him—has made that sacrifice before, but never consciously, never knowing that another moment he will cease to exist—as prior generations have, in the past.

He thinks about the goodness of his existence. Pre-shower Me had gotten up, like most pre-shower selves, at around 5:30. The usual morning routine would have ended abruptly—by about 5:45—in his destruction. Instead, this morning, he went to the living room, took out a notebook and wrote morning pages—a task usually delegated to post-shower selves. “I’d like to understand the way my mind works,” he wrote. “I’d like to make the best of my potential,” he continued. He wrote about the value of meditation in realizing potential, about the limited time that we all have. He wrote about the conflict between doing good in the world and enjoying life’s pleasures. He wrote that meditation would let you “take just as much pleasure from the world at the least cost” in time.

And then he went to the shower to die.

My birth

I was born to tell his story. I’m telling the story to you—any of you who read this blog. But I’m mainly telling the story to clarify it for myself—and for Future Mes.

I’m telling the story to you, Evening Me. I hope you will act in gratitude. I hope you will not prowl around putting food that you doesn’t want in your mouth and letting some Future You bear the consequences of your mindless behavior.

Evening Me, I hope that you will realize that you are here because Pre-shower You consciously, deliberately, and mindfully sacrificed his existence in the hope that something better would come of it. And with some hope of his own resurrection.

Jesus may be a myth. The idea of someone who was willing to die for the sake of all humankind may be just a story. The Me that died this morning for your sake—and what you could do to make the world better—may be just a metaphor. But then isn’t everything in life is a myth and a metaphor? In reality, I’m a cloud of quarks in quantum superposition and so are you. In metaphor, I am me, and you are you. We are more than quarks.

I was simply potential when Pre-shower Me died. I was born in the moment of his passing. But somehow I am a witness to his death and the bearer of its meaning. How this can be, I cannot tell you. But but I can tell you that this story is as true as you, or me, or any myth or metaphor.

I was there.

You will live, and then you will die and tomorrow another you will be born in your place. You have no choice in that. But you are not without power. You can choose how you live and you can choose how you die.

Future selves, when you become aware of something that you are doing or about to do that your brethren selves—future and past—would prefer you not to do or have done, think in particular on the life and death of December 16th 2018 Pre-shower Me, who loved life and died that you could live, and who hoped that you will make his, its, my sacrifice worthwhile.

Amen.

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More changes from the Waking Up Course.

The other day in A intentional meditation on intention and meditation, I wrote about some of the things I’d gained from the Waking up course.

Here are some more.

No Ambien

First: no Ambien. I’ve depended on Ambien (Zolpidem) to help me sleep for maybe fifteen years. Bobbi called it an addiction. That’s rather harsh. I preferred the less judgmental term “chemical dependence.” Ambien didn’t affect my performance as near as I could tell. I just needed it to get to sleep.

I started using Ambien during and after business trips to Europe and Japan. If you’ve seen Bill Murray’s movie Lost in Translation), you have an idea of what it’s like. If you’ve lived that movie, you know what it’s like. If neither, I’ll tell you: you’re dying to sleep, dying, and you can’t sleep. It sucks.

So Ambien was great for intercontinental travel. I’d take a pill, and I could sleep on the plane. Then just the right amount the night I arrived would put me on something like a regular sleep schedule, then a dose at night to reinforce. Then a couple of doses on the return trip. And then back to normal. Sounds pretty awful now that I write about it. But it wasn’t. It was salvation for the sleepless.

But then there was coast-to-coast domestic travel and Ambien to the rescue. And soon I had a problem: without Ambien, I could no longer get to sleep. Actually, I could. It just took a long time, and it felt like crap. I resented being tired and unable to sleep. And relief was just a pill away. If it had been an expensive drug or if I’d had to watch out for the cops or if it had impaired my performance, I would have fought my way off it. But it seemed all upside—except for addiction dependence.

It became a habit. I’d take Ambien I could to get the job done—about a quarter of a dose, but almost every night. Sometimes I’d need more, but that was rare. I slept well. I could stop if I was willing to brave the sleepless nights. So, not an addiction not such a big deal.

Every so often I’d decide to stop. I’d have to endure a few nights of being Bill Murray, and a few unproductive sleepy days. But I could break the habit. For a while. Because it wasn’t an addiction. Then we’d take a trip, and I’d have trouble sleeping in a strange bed or—I’d spend more than 40 seconds trying to get to sleep—or something. It was easier to take another dose than endure another sleepless night. God! I hate sleepless nights. I’d take the dose and get to sleep, and the next night I’d be faced with the same old crappy choice: either return to “normal” and go back to Ambien or—I don’t even want to think about it.

Anyway, the Waking Up Course has also been the Getting to Sleep Without Ambien Course. I can report that I now get eight or seven or six hours of uninterrupted sleep a night—but only if I lie. I don’t. What I can report, without lying, is that I go to bed and almost always go right to sleep. Most often I wake up a few hours later, and I need to pee. Something about old men and bladders. I don’t feel exhausted when I get up. I go back to bed, and most of the time I go right back to sleep. Other times I’m just not sleepy. So I’ll lie in bed and meditate. Hey, if I fall asleep, that’s good. And if I don’t fall asleep, that’s good too.

I have no proof the Waking Up Course has done this. Correlation, and all. But it’s happened.

Entering the state

Second: entering the meditative state. For about the first 25 Days, Sam’s guided meditation assumes that you need some time to settle in. You need his direction to detach your mind from the day’s concerns and get ready to do some serious meditation. Then he says: “You’ve got the rest of the day to tell yourself the story of your life” and directs you just to put everything aside. And so I have. I can sit down, close my eyes, and I’m present, ready to go. This doesn’t mean that I don’t get distracted. But it does mean that I don’t need to vamp my way into presence.

The space

Third: the space. You do some meditations with eyes open and then close your eyes or the reverse. Sam points out that your visual field is just as large with your eyes closed as it is when it’s open, and it is. In fact, it’s bigger.

With my eyes open, my visual field is the conventional one: what appears in front of my eyes. With my eyes closed, my visual field includes that. But if I “look out the front of my head” I see the same thing as when I “look out the back of my head.” So my visual field suffers from being all black. But in compensation, it goes from 180 degrees to 360 degrees. So that’s cool. And then the illusion that I am in the center of a space goes. There’s just—consciousness.

The practice

Fourth: the practice. “The Mind Illuminated” Culadasa offers a ten stage process to Awakening which he defines as “a profound shift in our intuitive understanding of reality.” The first step along his road is simple—and difficult. Develop a consistent and diligent practice. Consistent means every day. Diligent means not fucking around, but doing the best you can. I’ve never before made it to consistent, much less diligent.

Culadasa identifies the obstacles that we are likely to face while trying to develop a consistent practice. For one, we expect too much. If you think that you are going to get ANYTHING out of meditation before you’ve established a consistent practice, forget about it. You might, but don’t be disappointed until you’ve developed your practice. And not then either.

And if you think that developing a consistent practice will be easy, forget about that, too. Developing a consistent practice is an accomplishment. And it’s one to be celebrated.

Thanks to the Waking Up Course, I’ve got a good starting point for a consistent practice. Almost 50 days of ten-minute sessions, sometimes with some extra, because it was interesting. Now for this next stage, Culadasa suggests slightly longer sessions. Maybe twenty minutes to start. Something manageable.

I can do that.

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An intentional meditation on intention and meditation

Today is (or was) Day 46 of Sam Harris’s Waking Up Course. I suppose I could wait for Day 50 before reporting, but here I am, and this is what I am writing.

Maybe I’m early because I’m looking ahead. I haven’t been reading SlateStarCodex, so I did some catching up and read Scott’s review of “The Mind Illuminated”, and after a little research, I decided that was the next book for me. Last night I started reading it, and yes, it is the next book for me.

How I got here

That’s how I started the first draft of this post. I sat down and intended to write. Words appeared. And it’s a great illustration of one of the insights I’ve gotten from reading “The Mind Illuminated.”

Here’s the money quote:

…while it may not be obvious, all our achievements originate from intentions. Consider learning to play catch. As a child, you may have wanted to play catch, but at first, your arm and hand just didn’t move in quite the right way. However, by sustaining the intention to catch the ball, after much practice, your arm and hand eventually performed the task whenever you wanted. “You” don’t play catch. Instead, you just intend to catch the ball, and the rest follows. “You” intend, and the body acts.

Hey, Future Self! Pay attention. This is important.

We don’t do much. We intend things. And things happen.

I think, therefore I am. I intend, therefore, I do.

What happened?

I sat down to write. That was my intention: write a blog post. I hadn’t picked a topic—and therefore I didn’t intend what I would write about. I just intended that I would write. So when I started to write, the first sentence in this post just appeared. It seemed OK, so I didn’t decide to change it. So I kept going. There’s been a lot of editing and backtracking and rearranging of this post since then, but that first sentence is pretty much as originally written. It set the direction.

I repeat: I intended to write a post, and the mind/body/computer acted and produced a post. I did not write that first sentence. I intended to write, and the sentence appeared. I can assure you that I am not writing this sentence. (Or this parenthetical remark while editing.) I am not writing and have not written any of it. Trust me. I’m observing myself right now. I know what I am doing and not doing. Not writing.

A paragraph ago, I did have an intention that I could have articulated as something like explain this better and the first sentence in that paragraph, I intended to write…, appeared. Later, I went back, looked at what I had written, and thought something like this could be clearer, and after a few moments, my fingers typed a clarification.

Once in a while, a sentence appears in my mind before it appears in the document. I consider it, and I’ll decide something like "Ok, that's good," and then my fingers will type the sentence (or something like it), or I’ll think something like "that's not quite right" and I wait for something to appear in mind or on paper or in a doc. Most often, things appear in the document, not in my mind. I look, I type. Boom!

So what I’m doing is mostly intending and occasionally deciding. Not writing.

It takes more intention to post what I’ve written. I intend writing and open my Drafting document and put my fingers on the keyboard, and the writing appears. Odds of producing a post used to be low. I think that was because I needed to make too many intentional acts to get a post published. I’ve simplified that by using the process that I wrote about in Authoring, improved. Each step in the process has intentions wired in. I just make decisions, follow the process, and the rest happens automatically.

Here’s how it works. I keep writing until I decide something like good enough. I copy/paste the draft into Grammarly. The intention to correct/edit is present by default. So as soon as I paste, the mind/body/Grammarly system takes over and corrects and edits. When Grammarly tells me that the copy is clean, I copy/paste it into StackEdit. The mind/body/StackEdit system guides me to read, check the formatting, and put in links. Maybe I change what I’ve written. If so, I copy/paste back to Grammarly to make sure I didn’t fuck something up. Then back into StackEdit. Finally, if I decide good enough, I copy/paste to Blogger. I convert it to Markdown, and press Post. Every step follows from the original intention. It seems to work reliably. If another intention gets in the way, my meta-intention is to continue where I left off. And I do.

No more orphaned drafts. No more zero days.

I don’t do anything

Culadasa’s point and mine is: I don’t do any of this stuff. I don’t know how to make my body type this sentence. I don’t even know how to think it up. Sometimes it appears in consciousness, and I decide type or nope. And sometimes, it skips consciousness and just appears on paper or in a Doc. The point is: I only intend and decide, and I get a result.

That’s a long side trip into the working of my mind because I am right now fascinated with it. That’s where this post started out. I intended to write something. And then I intended to report what had happened 46 days into the Waking Up Course. And then, a sequence of changes in intention got me to this sentence.

Back to the beginning

So back to the original intention: what’s changed by Day 46?

First, there’s no doubt that I’m 45 days older. I won’t attribute that to the course. There’s a high probability that I would have aged by that much anyway. But I intended to write about what’s changed, and words like these are the first ones that appeared in the original draft.

Second, and more salient, I’ve found that I really, really, really like meditating—or at least meditating Sam Harris style. The other times I’ve tried meditating, it’s been like medicating. “Here’s this bad-tasting medicine. It’s good for you. Trust me; you’ll be glad you took it. Hold your nose and swallow it.” Yuck! No thanks.

I quoted Sam in my blog post, Waking up with my personal coach:

It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how deep and interesting and transformative this simple practice of paying close attention to your experience can become.

He’s right.

I’ve found that watching my mind at work is really interesting! And that’s surprising. I mean, watching the process by which intention and decision lead to a finished piece of writing. Fascinating.

And who would think that sitting there with my eyes closed, viewing the inside of my eyelids could be described as “fascinating.” But there I’ve been, sitting there with my eyes closed, viewing the inside of my eyelids, fascinated.

And now, I’m watching things that I’ve taken for granted or noted in passing and then taken for granted. What is it that I can really do, and what’s an illusion? I seem to be able to control my attention—to a degree. I seem to be able to intend things, but not everything that I intend happens, and not everything that happens is the result of a conscious intention. I seem to be able to make decisions. I’m not sure what else, but attention, intention, decision seems like a pretty good start.

Behind my eyelids

Back to looking at the backs of my closed eyes. At first, I saw what you’d expect to see: nothing. Or rather, undifferentiated blackness. But then things changed. I started noticing that the blackness was not uniform. Here it was a bit blacker and there a bit lighter. Somewhat interesting.

And then, after a bit, it seemed as though my whole visual field was changing. There was a cloud of blackness that was flooding into the area of not-so-blackness. And then the not-so-blackness flooded back. And part started to lighten. Interesting.

And then, after a while, there were dark clouds flooding into and out of the lighter area, which started to become lighter and lighter and become a bright cloud, not just a white area. Which was cool.

And then it seemed as though the dark and the light clouds were moving in a way that began to reveal something behind them. I could only see glimpses, but it was not just another cloud. It had texture and pattern. And…whoah! I wonder what’s going to happen!

And then the clouds vanished, and the entire visual field was an intensely colored pattern—orange and brown and yellow. Kind of a Tibetan motif, I guess. That’s pretty cool! And all I was doing was sitting and watching it happen.

Now stuff like this hasn’t happened all the time. To be precise, it has happened mostly never. But because, as Miracle Max might say, mostly never isn’t completely never. So I’m always interested in seeing what’s going to happen.

That? Something like that? Something different from that?

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We are each at the center of the universe, made of knowledge, in bodies of once-living stars

We are each at the center of a universe. We are each made of knowledge incorporated in bodies made from once-living stars. We and the world around us are full of potential.

These are facts as well as metaphors.

I am the child of many stars—as are you. We each contain knowledge accumulated over billions of years—much of it knowledge without a knower. But someday, perhaps it will all be known.

Each cell of each of our bodies contains knowledge, written in its DNA, that could create any number of human children, each a twin to us. That is the potential of that knowledge. To realize that potential requires a human female child, embodied, grown to maturity, or its equivalent: a mother. The knowledge with the potential to produce the body of such a mother is in that same DNA—but requires its own mother to realize it. Somewhere, in the timeless history of the universe, is the mother-to-us-all.

DNA does not contain the knowledge required to sustain a mother through the months that it will take her to assemble a new infant from her unknown knowledge and more star-matter. She needs people around her and her child-to-be, who can sustain her and support her, and who embody that knowledge. We call that knowledge by names like culture and community also collected over billions of years.

I am here because my mother helped the zygote-that-became-me produce the infant Me-At-Birth. The zygote had the potential to produce the infant, and both had the potential to produce each of the successive versions of Past Me up to the version of Present Me who is writing this. And I have the potential to produce a better version of myself.

But only if I make sacrifices. Generations of Past Me have sacrificed ( and sometimes not) to bring Present Me here— this morning, this moment, this place, writing this. And Present You, where you are, when you are, reading this.

I have been given gifts. Shall I not offer something in gratitude?

I first give thanks. My thanks connect me to those who have gone before me. If they have died to bring me here and now, they have not died in vain.

But perhaps they have not died. Maybe they live within me because, as Miracle Max says, they are only mostly dead. Sometimes they speak to me, and sometimes they seem to suffer. If so, I embrace their suffering—embrace them as they suffer. And I hope to ease it and relieve it with my gratitude and the knowledge that they have not suffered and died in vain.

I am grateful. Today I will sacrifice what I can. I will die so that Future Me can wake tomorrow, better than the Present Me that woke today.

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