Make for yourself a world you can believe in.

"It sounds simple, I know. But it's not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over these, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds' creations and continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don't live an accident. Don't call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I'm not a very smart man, but I'm not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I've told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning."

A Convergence Of Birds
Jonathan Safran Foer

***
I've been gone from here forever, I know. But now I'm back again! For now!

The same face shows youth and old age.

"When I was alive, I believed--as you do--that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls."

The Last Unicorn
by Peter S. Beagle

Consciousness is the ability to see the whole of our lives in each moment.

Precede each significant choice of the day, my dears, with the words, what is my purpose here?

Happy New Year!

"Barely four months total I had known Astrid and I felt like I had crossed over. Sometimes when I opened my mouth I felt like I could breathe fire.

Now I knew you could be in control like that. Anything could be yours, you could take it and all you had to do was ask. At the Coffee Trader, Metro, wherever. One minute you're stirring sugar into your coffee, the next you're flying through the night beside some hot guy with a pierced lip who whistles through his teeth and calls you darlin', just a little bit shy.

'Isn't it wild?' Astrid said after we'd picked up a cuple of punk rockers on Downer, all of us crammed into Juli's car, sitting on laps and laughing, heading for a garage party on the Southside.

'Wish I'd met you sooner,' I told her.

'Don't wish.' Astrid grinned. 'Just enjoy it.'

So we drove on, the three of us, young and glorious, fierce eyed and smoking, blazing though the night."

Whores on the Hill
by Colleen Curran

The ship travels dangerously at night.

Showing the outside and not the inside is self-deceiving, my dear.

Very often when you just can't decide between two or more options... it's because the answer that would most give you peace, is actually, "None of the above."

But not always.

Claim the fact you are choosing where and where not to put your energy, and make choices, darlings, which bridge inner and outer.

The house burns while the neighbors watch.

Whenever bumped off course, darlings, it's often wise to pause and ascertain whether or not you've really been dealt a setback, or if it was in fact a little nudge from 'the Universe' designed to subtly prepare you for something even better.

Because I'm sure you'll see, if you want to, it was the latter.

We seldom choose when something is to go, my dears, but we can most certainly choose how we give it up.

***

And just for you, sweetie:

Apologize to an old soul, and your gesture will be honored.

Apologize to a young soul and matters may become extremely complicated.

Apologize anyway.

Happily, hanging around afterwards is always purely optional!

Hanging out at the coffee shop.

"And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore."

-- Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy