We Can't Predict Life Quotes

Life comes at us in waves. We can't predict or control those waves, but we can learn to surf

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

I've been desperately unhappy in my life." Her voice was quiet. "Have you, Chief Inspector?" It wasn't a response he could have predicted. He nodded. "I thought so. I think people who have had that experience and survived have a responsibility to help others. We can't let someone drown where we were saved.

If we don't accept any common beliefs, we can't exist in spacetime. But when we don't believe in age, at least we don't have to die because our numbers change. [...] When you don't believe in birthdays, the idea of aging turns a little foreign to you. You don't fall into trauma over your sixteenth birthday or your thirtieth or the big Five-Oh or the deadly Century. You measure your life by what you learn, not by counting how many calendars you've seen. If you're going to have trauma, better it be the shock of discovering the fundamental principle of the universe that some date predictable as next July.

Cancer forced me out of my comfort zone. But the reality is that in life, there are no true comfort zones. Life comes at us in ways that we can't predict or control.

Well, we all like things to be predictable, don't we? We expect things to be safe and to keep on happening just the way they always have. We expect the sun to rise in the morning. We expect to get up, survive the day and finish up back in bed at the end of it, ready to start all over again the next day. But maybe that's just a trick we play on ourselves, our way of making life seem ordinary. Because the truth is, life is so extraordinary that for most of hte time we can't bring ourselves to look at it. It's too bright and it hurts our eyes. The fact of the matter is that nothing is ever certain. But most people never find that out until the ground suddenly disappears from beneath their feet.

It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.

Morita likened emotions to the weather: We can’t predict or control them; we can only observe them.

People annoy the crap out of me," he says. "I think people are nervous and loud and rude and selfish and stupid pretty much all the time." [...] "If they're beautiful they know it, so they don't bother having a personality or associating with people that don't fit into their league or can't afford their company. And, somehow these people are the most popular, which makes absolutely no sense. People try so hard to be accepted, they turn into a walking stereotype. They're pathetically easy to predict. They're insecure and try to mask it with whatever product corporate America is currently making and they always let you down. Just give them enough time, and they will." [...] "I think everyone's caught up in these narrow-minded worlds and they think their world exists in the center of the universe. Relationship only happen when it's convenient. You have to walk on eggshells for people because that's how strong they are these days. And you can't confront people, because if you do, that brittle shell of confidence will crack. So we all become passive cowards that carry a fake smile wherever we go because God forbid you let your guard down long enough for people to see your life isn't perfect. That you have a few flaws. Because who wants to see that?

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian’s Doug Erwin, is that we can’t predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors. "There will be plenty of surprises. Let’s face it: who would’ve predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn’t exist, no vertebrate biologist would’ve suggested that anything would do that: he’d have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.

I learned that you can’t predict your future, there’s no crystal ball or formula for happiness. You can’t control the weather just like you can’t control the way others behave, but what you can control is how much love you give. Surrendering to this crazy thing called life is hard, but we don’t have to be the soulless sheets of paper tarrying along in the wind. We can find our people, love, respect them, and then hang on for dear life because it’s not where you go on this journey but who you’re with that matters the most.

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian's Doug Erwin, is that we can't predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors. "There will be plenty of surprises. Let's face it: who would've predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn't exist, no vertebrate biologist would've suggested that anything would do that: he'd have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.

Like heartbreak, these unpredictable crises are not something you should live in fear of. Perpetual fear won't protect you. Fear is not a citronella candle; scary life happenings are not mosquitoes. They happen in ways we can't predict, control or understand. The only guaranteed outcome of feeling scared all the time is that you will feel scared all the time.

As the staggered lines rushed past him, he thought about the space between what we remember and what happened, the space between what we predict and what will happen. And in that space, Colin thought, there was room enough to reinvent himself - room enough to make himself into something other than a prodigy, to remake his story better and different - room enough to be reborn again and again. A snake killer, an Archduke, a slayer of TOCs - a genius, even. There was room enough to be anyone - anyone except whom he'd already been, for if Colin had learned one thing from Gutshot, it's that you can't stop the future from coming. And for the first time in his life, he smiled thinking about the always-coming infinite future stretching out before him.

Life isn’t about what happens to us, Dallas, because things are going to happen. Rich, poor, good parents, bad parents, no matter what, we can’t predict other people. If I can’t change it or prevent it, then I don’t think about it. Just adapt when it happens, and remember how lucky I am to breathe at all.

In the writings of many contemporary psychics and mystics (e.g., Gopi Krishna, Shri Rajneesh, Frannie Steiger, John White, Hal Lindsay, and several dozen others whose names I have mercifully forgotten) there is a repeated prediction that the Earth is about to be afflicted with unprecedented calamities, including every possible type of natural catastrophe from Earthquakes to pole shifts. Most of humanity will be destroyed, these seers inform us cheerfully. This cataclysm is referred to, by many of them, as "the Great Purification" or "the Great Cleansing," and is supposed to be a punishment for our sins. I find the morality and theology of this Doomsday Brigade highly questionable. A large part of the Native American population was exterminated in the 19th century; I cannot regard that as a "Great Cleansing" or believe that the Indians were being punished for their sins. Nor can I think of Hitler's death camps, or Hiroshima or Nagasaki, as "Great Purifications." And I can't make myself believe that the millions killed by plagues, cancers, natural catastrophes, etc., throughout history were all singled out by some Cosmic Intelligence for punishment, while the survivors were preserved due to their virtues. To accept the idea of "God" implicit in such views is logically to hold that everybody hit by a car deserved it, and we should not try to get him to a hospital and save his life, since "God" wants him dead. I don't know who are the worst sinners on this planet, but I am quite sure that if a Higher Intelligence wanted to exterminate them, It would find a very precise method of locating each one separately. After all, even Lee Harvey Oswald -- assuming the official version of the Kennedy assassination -- only hit one innocent bystander while aiming at JFK. To assume that Divinity would employ earthquakes and pole shifts to "get" (say) Richard Nixon, carelessly murdering millions of innocent children and harmless old ladies and dogs and cats in the process, is absolutely and ineluctably to state that your idea of God is of a cosmic imbecile.

Life is timed to a watch we don't control. Things happen today to set up things later that we can't predict or see or imagine. Don't fight it. Embrace it.

My Darling, It is late at night and though the words are coming hard to me, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s time that I finally answer your question. Of course I forgive you. I forgive you now, and I forgave you the moment I read your letter. In my heart, I had no other choice. Leaving you once was hard enough; to have done it a second time would have been impossible. I loved you too much to have let you go again. Though I’m still grieving over what might have been, I find myself thankful that you came into my life for even a short period of time. In the beginning, I’d assumed that we were somehow brought together to help you through your time of grief. Yet now, one year later, I’ve come to believe that it was the other way around. Ironically, I am in the same position you were, the first time we met. As I write, I am struggling with the ghost of someone I loved and lost. I now understand more fully the difficulties you were going through, and I realize how painful it must have been for you to move on. Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever. It would be easy for me to do that because loving someone else might diminish my memories of you. Yet, this is the paradox: Even though I miss you greatly, it’s because of you that I don’t dread the future. Because you were able to fall in love with me, you have given me hope, my darling. You taught me that it’s possible to move forward in life, no matter how terrible your grief. And in your own way, you’ve made me believe that true love cannot be denied. Right now, I don’t think I’m ready, but this is my choice. Do not blame yourself. Because of you, I am hopeful that there will come a day when my sadness is replaced by something beautiful. Because of you, I have the strength to go on. I don’t know if spirits do indeed roam the world, but even if they do, I will sense your presence everywhere. When I listen to the ocean, it will be your whispers; when I see a dazzling sunset, it will be your image in the sky. You are not gone forever, no matter who comes into my life. you are standing with God, alongside my soul, helping to guide me toward a future that I cannot predict. This is not a good-bye, my darling, this is a thank-you. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. I love you

It was women’s individual experiences of victimization that produced our widespread moral and political opposition to it. And at the same time, there was something about the hashtag itself—its design, and the ways of thinking that it affirms and solidifies—that both erased the variety of women’s experiences and made it seem as if the crux of feminism was this articulation of vulnerability itself. A hashtag is specifically designed to remove a statement from context and to position it as part of an enormous singular thought. A woman participating in one of these hashtags becomes visible at an inherently predictable moment of male aggression: the time her boss jumped her, or the night a stranger followed her home. The rest of her life, which is usually far less predictable, remains unseen. Even as women have attempted to use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative, these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else. What we have in common is obviously essential, but it’s the differences between women’s stories—the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world. And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.

Why should jokes and metaphors give such pleasure? Because we can't stand very much ambiguity. Cognitive dissonance makes us uneasy, and for good reason-survival depends on making the world as predictable as possible. So when we figure something out, when we impose order on what seems chaotic, we heave a psychological sigh of relief.

We don’t create our feelings; they simply come to us, and we have to accept them. The trick is welcoming them. Morita likened emotions to the weather: We can’t predict or control them; we can only observe them. To this point, he often quoted the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who would say, “Hello, solitude. How are you today? Come, sit with me, and I will care for you.

Most of the pain we experience, whether we realize it or not, comes from the fantasies we live in. We create our own worlds, where there are certain rules, things to be done and said and events to happen. And every time that doesn’t go according to the plan (which, basically, means anything because we have no control over what might happen and can’t predict it), we panic.

If our children’s lives are the sea floor, we need to leave the gold all over it, everywhere, in little bits. We can’t do it one big nugget. We can’t even do it in a bunch of medium chunks. We have to leave gold through their lives in a fine dust that’s spread all over everything. At the end of our children’s lives, we hope we hope it is worth a fortune. But at any given moment it is the little things that contain the gold. The gold is quick forgiveness. It is quick repentance. It is cheerful smiles and tender hugs. It is teasing and laughing. It is loving. It is Daddy throwing yet another wrestle party all over the house. It is dinner. Regular. Predictable. It is having physical needs looked after. It is being disciplined. It is being challenged. It is being educated. Being made to do something you didn’t want to. It is not being the boss. It is not getting away with lying. It is knowing who to talk to. It is knowing you will feel better when you do. It is security. It is joy. It is every day. It is life. It is knowing your faith, and knowing that it is your parents’ too. It is knowing your people and being known by them.

We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we’ve chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons, that agency and volition dwell there. Our intuitions scream this, because we don’t know about, can’t imagine, the subterranean forces of our biological history that brought it about. It is a huge challenge to overcome those intuitions when you still have to wait for science to be able to predict that behavior precisely.

If we have obsessive thoughts, we should not try to control them or get rid of them. If we do, they become more intense. Regarding human emotions, the Zen master would say, “If we try to get rid of one wave with another, we end up with an infinite sea.” We don’t create our feelings; they simply come to us, and we have to accept them. The trick is welcoming them. Morita likened emotions to the weather: We can’t predict or control them; we can only observe them.

There is nothing that the media could say to me that would justify the way they’ve acted. You can hound me. You can follow me, but in no way should you frighten those around me. To harm my wife and potentially harm my daughter—there is no excuse that could put any of you on the right side of morality. I met Rose when I was fifteen and she was fourteen, and through what she would call fate and I’d call circumstance of our hobbies, we’d cross paths dozens of times over the course of a decade. At seventeen, I attended the same national Model UN conference as Rose, and a delegate for Greenland locked us in a janitorial closet. He also stole our phones. He had to beat us dishonorably because he couldn’t beat us any other way. Rose said being locked in a confined space with me was the worst two hours of her life" They look bemused, brows furrowing. I can’t help but smile. “You’re confused because you don’t know whether she was exaggerating or whether she was being truthful. But the truth is that we are complex people with the ability to love to hate and to hate to love, and I wouldn’t trade her for any other person. So that day, stuck beside mops and dirtied towels, I could’ve picked the lock five minutes in and let her go. Instead, I purposefully spent two hours with a girl who wore passion like a dress made of diamonds and hair made of flames. Every day of my life, I am enamored. Every day of my life, I am bewitched. And every day of my life, I spend it with her.” My chest swells with more power, lifting me higher. “I’ve slept with many different kinds of people, and yes, the three that spoke to the press are among them. Rose is the only person I’ve ever loved, and through that love, we married and started a family. There is no other meaning behind this, and for you to conjure one is nothing less than a malicious attack against my marriage and my child. Anything else has no relevance. I can’t be what you need me to be. So you’ll have to accept this version or waste your time questioning something that has no answer. I know acceptance isn’t easy when you’re unsure of what you’re accepting, but all I can say is that you’re accepting me as me. I leave them with a quote from Sylvia Plath. “‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.’” My lips pull higher, into a livelier smile. “‘I am, I am, I am.’” With this, I step away from the podium, and I exit to a cacophony of journalists shouting and asking me to clarify. Adapt to me. I’m satisfied, more than I even predicted. Some people will rewind this conference on their television, to listen closely and try to understand me. I don’t need their understanding, but my daughter will—and I hope the minds of her peers are wide open with vibrant hues of passion. I hope they all paint the world with color.

There is a change underway, however. Our society used to be a ladder on which people generally climbed upward. More and more now we are going to a planetary structure, in which the great dominant lower middle class, the class that determines our prevailing values and organizational structures in education, government, and most of society, are providing recruits for the other groups — sideways, up, and even down, although the movement downward is relatively small. As the workers become increasingly petty bourgeois and as middle-class bureaucratic and organizational structures increasingly govern all aspects of our society, our society is increasingly taking on the characteristics of the lower middle class, although the poverty culture is also growing. The working class is not growing. Increasingly we are doing things with engineers sitting at consoles, rather than with workers screwing nuts on wheels. The workers are a diminishing, segment of society, contrary to Marx’s prediction that the proletariat would grow and grow. I have argued elsewhere that many people today are frustrated because we are surrounded by organizational structures and artifacts. Only the petty bourgeoisie can find security and emotional satisfaction in an organizational structure, and only a middle-class person can find them in artifacts, things that men have made, such as houses, yachts, and swimming pools. But human beings who are growing up crave sensation and experience. They want contact with other people, moment-to-moment, intimate contact. I’ve discovered, however, that the intimacy really isn’t there. Young people touch each other, often in an almost ritual way; they sleep together, eat together, have sex together. But I don’t see the intimacy. There is a lot of action, of course, but not so much more than in the old days, I believe, because now there is a great deal more talk than action. This group, the lower middle class, it seems to me, holds the key to the future. I think probably they will win out. If they do, they will resolutely defend our organizational structures and artifacts. They will cling to the automobile, for instance; they will not permit us to adopt more efficient methods of moving people around. They will defend the system very much as it is and, if necessary, they will use all the force they can command. Eventually they will stop dissent altogether, whether from the intellectuals, the religious, the poor, the people who run the foundations, the Ivy League colleges, all the rest. The colleges are already becoming bureaucratized, anyway. I can’t see the big universities or the foundations as a strong progressive force. The people who run Harvard and the Ford Foundation look more and more like lower-middle-class bureaucrats who pose no threat to the established order because they are prepared to do anything to defend the system.

That’s right. It’s about contact. In my view, the whole thing is in essence extremely simple. Contact means an exchange of experiences, concepts, or at least results, conditions. But what if there’s nothing to exchange? If an elephant isn’t a very large bacterium, then an ocean can’t be a very large brain. Of course, various actions can be performed by both sides. As a result of one of them I’m looking at you right now and trying to explain to you that you’re more precious to me than the twelve years of my life I devoted to Solaris, and that I want to go on being with you. Perhaps your appearance was meant to be torture, perhaps a reward, or perhaps just a test under a microscope. An expression of friendship, a treacherous blow, perhaps a taunt? Perhaps everything at once or—as seems most likely to me—something entirely different. But what can you and I really care about the intentions of our parents, however different they were from one another? You can say that our future depends on those intentions, and I’d agree with you. I can’t predict what’s to come. Nor can you. I can’t even assure you I’ll always love you. If so much has already happened, then anything can happen. Maybe tomorrow I’ll turn into a green jellyfish? It doesn’t depend on me. But in what does depend on us, we’ll be together. Is that not something?

Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?" Mustapha Mond laughed. "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut," he answered. "We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas–that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!" he repeated. The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully. "It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle–an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing." "What was that?" asked the Savage. Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen." The Savage sighed, profoundly. "The optimum population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled on the iceberg–eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above." "And they're happy below the water line?" "Happier than above it.

Wyn and Harriet’s version of a comedy of remarriage looks a bit different. Their history is less gags and hijinks, and more quiet failures, small untruths, imagined slights, accumulations of little hurts. And sure, miscommunication. Which we all hate. We hate it so much we’ve come to consider it a trope in itself. Just talk about it, we scream at our books and TVs. But in real life, for many of us, confrontation is terrifying. The thought of telling someone they hurt us, or asking if we’ve hurt them—starting a conversation whose ending we can’t predict—is terrifying. Even if we can’t name the thing we’re so afraid of on the other end. Being rejected? Knowing for certain that the person we care about doesn’t care for us in the same way? Deepening a shallow cut past the point of being able to heal? I think, sometimes, we are simply afraid to need. We’re afraid that if we ask too much, if we bare our tenderest wounds and show our ugliest sides, we’ll find out that we aren’t lovable. That we can only keep the ones we love around us as long as we cost them nothing, create no burden. That, at least I think, is the plight of the people pleaser. And though I set out to write one kind of story (and hopefully, on some level, succeeded!), that’s what Happy Place has really come to be about: the ways in which we fail ourselves, cut ourselves off from true, deep, fulfilling joy by trying to bend ourselves into acceptable shapes. This book, like every novel I’ve written so far, has been a kind of exorcism. It’s helped me look more closely at my own relationships, most especially my relationship to myself, and the ways in which I’ve tended to fail myself.

It is frightening to step off onto the treacherous footbridge leading to the second half of life. We can’t take everything with us on this journey through uncertainty. Along the way, we discover that we are alone. We no longer have to ask permission because we are the providers of our own safety. We must learn to give ourselves permission. We stumble upon feminine or masculine aspects of our natures that up to this time have usually been masked. There is grieving to be done because an old self is dying. By taking in our suppressed and even our unwanted parts, we prepare at the gut level for the reintegration of an identity that is ours and ours alone—not some artificial form put together to please the culture or our mates. It is a dark passage at the beginning. But by disassembling ourselves, we can glimpse the light and gather our parts into a renewal.

Yesterday while I was on the side of the mat next to some wrestlers who were warming up for their next match, I found myself standing side by side next to an extraordinary wrestler. He was warming up and he had that look of desperation on his face that wrestlers get when their match is about to start and their coach is across the gym coaching on another mat in a match that is already in progress. “Hey do you have a coach.” I asked him. “He's not here right now.” He quietly answered me ready to take on the task of wrestling his opponent alone. “Would you mind if I coached you?” His face tilted up at me with a slight smile and said. “That would be great.” Through the sounds of whistles and yelling fans I heard him ask me what my name was. “My name is John.” I replied. “Hi John, I am Nishan” he said while extending his hand for a handshake. He paused for a second and then he said to me: “John I am going to lose this match”. He said that as if he was preparing me so I wouldn’t get hurt when my coaching skills didn’t work magic with him today. I just said, “Nishan - No score of a match will ever make you a winner. You are already a winner by stepping onto that mat.” With that he just smiled and slowly ran on to the mat, ready for battle, but half knowing what the probable outcome would be. When you first see Nishan you will notice that his legs are frail - very frail. So frail that they have to be supported by custom made, form fitted braces to help support and straighten his limbs. Braces that I recognize all to well. Some would say Nishan has a handicap. I say that he has a gift. To me the word handicap is a word that describes what one “can’t do”. That doesn’t describe Nishan. Nishan is doing. The word “gift” is a word that describes something of value that you give to others. And without knowing it, Nishan is giving us all a gift. I believe Nishan’s gift is inspiration. The ability to look the odds in the eye and say “You don’t pertain to me.” The ability to keep moving forward. Perseverance. A “Whatever it takes” attitude. As he predicted, the outcome of his match wasn’t great. That is, if the only thing you judge a wrestling match by is the actual score. Nishan tried as hard as he could, but he couldn’t overcome the twenty-six pound weight difference that he was giving up to his opponent on this day in order to compete. You see, Nishan weighs only 80 pounds and the lowest weight class in this tournament was 106. Nishan knew he was spotting his opponent 26 pounds going into every match on this day. He wrestled anyway. I never did get the chance to ask him why he wrestles, but if I had to guess I would say, after watching him all day long, that Nishan wrestles for the same reasons that we all wrestle for. We wrestle to feel alive, to push ourselves to our mental, physical and emotional limits - levels we never knew we could reach. We wrestle to learn to use 100% of what we have today in hopes that our maximum today will be our minimum tomorrow. We wrestle to measure where we started from, to know where we are now, and to plan on getting where we want to be in the future. We wrestle to look the seemingly insurmountable opponent right in the eye and say, “Bring it on. - I can take whatever you can dish out.” Sometimes life is your opponent and just showing up is a victory. You don't need to score more points than your opponent in order to accomplish that. No Nishan didn’t score more points than any of his opponents on this day, that would have been nice, but I don’t believe that was the most important thing to Nishan. Without knowing for sure - the most important thing to him on this day was to walk with pride like a wrestler up to a thirty two foot circle, have all eyes from the crowd on him, to watch him compete one on one against his opponent - giving it all that he had. That is what competition is all about. Most of the times in wrestlin

If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.88 That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect. There is something more to be said, however, about Chip Macal’s idea of “modeling for insights.” The philosophy of this book is that prediction is as much a means as an end. Prediction serves a very central role in hypothesis testing, for instance, and therefore in all of science.89 As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail. How pertinent that detail might be will depend on exactly what problem we’re trying to solve and on how precise an answer we require.

Adrian and Sydney, I know each of you have your own ways of figuring out where I am. If that’s the course of action to choose to take, nothing I do can stop you. But, I’m begging you, please don’t. Please let me stay away. Let the guardians think I’ve gone AWOL. Let me wander the world, helping those I can. I know you think I should stay with Declan. Believe me, I wish I could. I wish more than anything that I could stay and raise Olive’s son – my son – and give him all the things he needs. But I can’t shake the feeling that we’d never be safe. Someday, someone might start asking about Olive and her son. Someone might connect the baby I’m raising to him, and then her fears would be realized. News of his conception would change our world. It would excite some people and scare others. Most of all, it’d make Olive’s predictions come true: people wanting to study him like a lab rat. And that’s why I’m proposing that no one finds out he’s my son or Olive’s. From now on, let him be yours. No one would question you two raising a dhampir. After all, your own children will be dhampirs, and from what I’ve seen, you two are smart enough to find a way to convince others he’s your biological child. I’ve also seen the way you two love each other, the way you support each other. Even with as challenging as your relationship has been, you’ve held true to yourselves and each other. That’s what Declan needs. That’s the kind of home Olive wanted for him, the kind I want for him. I know it won’t be easy, and walking away from this is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. If a day comes when I can feel convinced that it’s safe, beyond a doubt, for me to be in his life, then I will. You can use one of those magical methods of yours to find me, and I swear I’ll be there at his side in an instant. But until then, so long as the shadow of others’ fear and scrutiny hangs over him, I beg you to take him and give him the beautiful life I know you can give him. Best, Neil

Naval’s Laws The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them. “These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.” Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

I breathed in a deep dose of night air, trying to calm my schoolgirl nervousness. “I, umm…” I began. “I decided to stick around here a little while.” There. I’d said it. This was all officially real. Without a moment of hesitation, Marlboro Man wrapped his ample arms around my waist. Then, in what seemed to be less than a second, he hoisted me from my horizontal position on the bed of his pickup until we were both standing in front of each other. Scooping me off my feet, he raised me up to his height so his icy blue eyes were level with mine. “Wait…are you serious?” he asked, taking my face in his hands. Squaring it in front of his. Looking me in the eye. “You’re not going?” “Nope,” I answered. “Whoa,” he said, smiling and moving in for a long, impassioned kiss on the back of his Ford F250. “I can’t believe it,” he continued, squeezing me tightly. Our knees buckled under the heat, and before I knew it we were back where we’d been before, rolling around and kissing manically in the bed of his diesel pickup. Occasionally my arm would hit a crowbar and my head would slam against a spare tire or a cattle prod or a jack; I didn’t care, of course. I’d said what I wanted to say that night. Everything else--even minor head injuries--was a piece of cake. We stayed there a long, long time, the balmy night air giving us no good reason to leave. Under the innumerable stars, amidst all the embraces and kisses and sounds from the surrounding livestock, I suddenly felt more at peace in my decision than I had since my phone call with Rhonda the Realtor that morning. I felt at home, comfortable, nestled in, wonderful. My life had changed that day, changed in a way I never, ever, could have predicted. My big-city plans--plans many months in the making--had all at once been smashed to smithereens by a six-foot cowboy with manure on his boots. A cowboy I’d known, essentially, for less than three weeks. It was the craziest thing I’d ever done, deciding to take an impulsive walk down this new and unexpected path. And while I secretly wondered how long it would take for me to regret my decision, I rested easily, at least for that night, in the knowledge that I’d had the courage to step out on such an enormous limb. It was late. Time to go. “Want me to drive you home now?” Marlboro Man asked, lacing our fingers together, kissing the back of my hand. “Or, do you…” He paused, considering his words. “Do you want to come stay at my place?

unless we’re missing our guess, your life and the gospel probably haven’t always felt in sync on a lot of days, in most of the years since. After the emotional scene with the trembling chin and the wadded-up Kleenexes, where you truly felt the weight of your own sin and the Spirit’s conviction, you’ve had a hard time consistently enjoying and experiencing what God’s supposedly done to remedy this self-defeating situation. Even on those repeat occasions when you’ve crashed and burned and resolved to do better, you’ve typically only been able, for a little while, to sit on your hands, trying to stay in control of yourself by rugged determination and brute sacrifice (which you sure hope God is noticing and adding to your score). But you’ll admit, it’s not exactly a feeling of freedom and victory. And anytime the wheels come off again, as they often do, it just feels like the same old condemnation as before. Devastating that you can’t crack the code on this thing, huh? You were pretty sure that being a Christian was supposed to change you—and it has. Some. But man, there’s still so much more that needs changing. Drastic things. Daily things. Changes in your habits, your routines, in your choices and decisions, changes to the stuff you just never stop hating about yourself, changes in what you do and don’t do . . . and don’t ever want to do again! Changes in how you think, how you cope, how you ride out the guilt and shame when you’ve blown it again. How you shoot down those old trigger responses—the ones you can’t seem to keep from reacting badly to, even after you keep telling yourself to be extra careful, knowing how predictably they set you off. Changes in your closest relationships, changes in your work habits, changes that have just never happened for you before, the kind of changes that—if you can ever get it together—might finally start piling up, you think, rolling forward, fueling some fresh momentum for you, keeping you moving in the right direction. But then—stop us if you’ve heard this one before . . . You barely if ever change. And come on, shouldn’t you be more transformed by now? This is around the point where, when what you’ve always thought or expected of God is no longer squaring with what you’re feeling, that you start creating your own cover versions of the gospel, piecing together things you’ve heard and believed and experimented with—some from the past, some from the present. You lay down new tracks with a gospel feel but, sadly, not always a lot of gospel truth.

We'll get to know each other bit by bit, and each time we meet shell tell me a little more about the circumstances of her life, and on and on we'll continue to probe, in an effort, I suppose, to reach the end of each other. Yet if we did--if we knew everything there was to know--we would become the most predictable , boring people in the world. If I have learned anything, it's that mystery is inherent to being interesting, especially when it comes to whom we decide to love. And so one day I'll call and I'll say I can't make it this time, and for the next few years it will continue this way, some visits kept, others not.

Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race. And this leads, predictably, to the kind of extreme displays and exaggerated features we find across the biological world. If the Hajj seems extravagant, remember the peacock’s tail or the towering redwoods. But note, crucially, that sacrifice isn’t a zero-sum game; there are big benefits that accrue to the entire community. All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior.38 The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39 Today, we facilitate trust between strangers using contracts, credit scores, and letters of reference. But before these institutions had been invented, weekly worship and other costly sacrifices were a vital social technology. In 1000 a.d., church attendance was a pretty good (though imperfect) way to gauge whether someone was trustworthy. You’d be understandably wary of your neighbors who didn’t come to church, for example, because they’re not “paying their dues” to the community. Society can’t trust you unless you put some skin in the game.

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fullness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should keep on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is no more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

1. The future is not a “point”—a single scenario that we must predict. It is a range. We should bookend the future, considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good.     •  Investor Penstock bet on Coinstar when his bookend analysis showed much more upside than downside. • Our predictions grow more accurate when we stretch our bookends outward. 2. To prepare for the lower bookend, we need a premortem. “It’s a year from now. Our decision has failed utterly. Why?” • The 100,000 Homes Campaign avoided a legal threat by using a premortem-style analysis. 3. To be ready for the upper bookend, we need a preparade. “It’s a year from now. We’re heroes. Will we be ready for success?”     •  The producer of Softsoap, hoping for a huge national launch, locked down the supply of plastic pumps for 18 to 24 months. 4. To prepare for what can’t be foreseen, we can use a “safety factor.”     •  Elevator cables are made 11 times stronger than needed; software schedules include a “buffer factor.” 5. Anticipating problems helps us cope with them. • The “realistic job preview”: Revealing a job’s warts up front “vaccinates” people against dissatisfaction.     •  Sandra rehearsed how she would ask her boss for a raise and what she’d say and do at various problem moments. 6. By bookending—anticipating and preparing for both adversity and success—we stack the deck in favor of our decisions.

The ocean is a good metaphor for our interconnected life. With a regular meditation practice, we can learn to surf life’s waves, but chances are good that we will sometimes be overpowered by them for a while. A technique like following your breath is a great surfboard for riding these waves. But when the surf is up and you’re being submerged in wave after wave of fear, anger, and anxiety, you may need a more specialized surfboard, possibly adding counting your breath, repeating a mantra or phrase that is meaningful to you, or doing walking meditation rather than simply sitting still. Sometimes Jerry and I felt as if we were wasting our time trying to surf—we were just getting knocked over by one wave after another. Days and sometimes even weeks went by when we weren’t making any progress at all—very discouraging. Life can be like that, but with a regular meditation practice, you learn to experience each wave not as an obstacle to your real life but as your real life. Eventually you may learn to enjoy the surf directly, with no board at all, experiencing the joy of being fully immersed in the water, regardless of its turbulent energies. Each wave has its own unique nature. It also has the nature of the entire ocean, because a wave is not separate from the ocean. You learn to be patient when you’re riding the energy of the entire ocean. Jerry and I surfed on calm days and on stormy days. Surfing on stormy days isn’t easy, but the storm is never separate from the calmness down below. Even so, for every thrilling swell that lifts you upward toward the sky, there is a trough that can send you reeling into the darkest depths. Troughs are part of the ocean, too. When you’re in a deep trough, you can’t go forward and you can’t retreat. Nor can you predict what will come next, because you can’t see beyond the trough. In the troughs, you learn to trust, to have courage, and to be patient—qualities that come naturally if you’re committed to surfing the entire ocean.

Decision trees instead ensure a priori that each instance will be matched by exactly one rule. This will be the case if each pair of rules differs in at least one attribute test, and such a rule set can be organized into a decision tree. For example, consider these rules: If you’re for cutting taxes and pro-life, you’re a Republican. If you’re against cutting taxes, you’re a Democrat. If you’re for cutting taxes, pro-choice, and against gun control, you’re an independent. If you’re for cutting taxes, pro-choice, and pro-gun control, you’re a Democrat. These can be organized into the following decision tree: A decision tree is like playing a game of twenty questions with an instance. Starting at the root, each node asks about the value of one attribute, and depending on the answer, we follow one or another branch. When we arrive at a leaf, we read off the predicted concept. Each path from the root to a leaf corresponds to a rule. If this reminds you of those annoying phone menus you have to get through when you call customer service, it’s not an accident: a phone menu is a decision tree. The computer on the other end of the line is playing a game of twenty questions with you to figure out what you want, and each menu is a question. According to the decision tree above, you’re either a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent; you can’t be more than one, or none of the above. Sets of concepts with this property are called sets of classes, and the algorithm that predicts them is a classifier. A single concept implicitly defines two classes: the concept itself and its negation. (For example, spam and nonspam.) Classifiers are the most widespread form of machine learning. We can learn decision trees using a variant of the “divide and conquer” algorithm. First we pick an attribute to test at the root. Then we focus on the examples that went down each branch and pick the next test for those. (For example, we check whether tax-cutters are pro-life or pro-choice.) We repeat this for each new node we induce until all the examples in a branch have the same class, at which point we label that branch with the class.

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fulness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should kept on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is not more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

Sometimes I feel compelled to do something, but I can only guess later why it needed to done, and I question whether I am drawing connections where none really exist. Other times I see an event – in a dream or in a flash of “knowing” – and I feel compelled to work toward changing the outcome (if it’s a negative event) or ensuring it (when the event is positive). At the times I am able to work toward changing or ensuring the predicted event, sometimes this seems to make a difference, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Finally, and most often, throughout my life I have known mundane information before I should have known it. For example, one of my favourite games in school was to guess what numbers my math teacher would use to demonstrate a concept, or to guess the words on a vocabulary test before the test was given. I noticed I was not correct all the time, but I was correct enough to keep playing the game. Perhaps partially because of the usefulness of this mundane skill, I was an outstanding student, getting straight As and graduating from college with highest honours in neuroscience and a minor in computer science. I was a modest drinker even in college, but I found I could ace tests when I was hungover after a night of indulgence. Sometimes I think I even did better the less I paid attention to the test and the more I felt sick or spacey. It was like my unconscious mind could take over and put the correct information onto the page without interruption from my overly analytical conscious mind. At graduate school in neuroscience, I focused on trying to understand human experience by studying how the brain processes pain and stress. I wanted to know the answer to the question: what’s going on inside people’s heads when we suffer? Later, as I finished my PhD in psychoacoustics, which is all about the psychology of sound, I became fascinated with timing. How do we figure out the order of sounds, even when some sounds take longer to process than others? How can drummers learn to decode time differences of 1/1,000 of a second, when most people just can’t hear those kinds of subtle time differences? At this point, I was using my premonitions as just one of the tools in my day-to-day toolkit, but I wasn’t thinking about them scientifically. At least not consciously. Sure, every so often I’d dream of the slides that would be used by one of my professors the next day in class. Or I’d realize that the data I was recording in my experiments followed the curve of an equation I’d dreamed about a year before. But I thought that was just my quirky way of doing things – it was just my good student’s intuition and it didn’t have anything to do with my research interests or my life’s work. What was my life’s work again?

While we can’t predict which problems will inevitably crop up in life, we can learn time-tested ideas that help us prepare for whatever the world throws at us.

The assessment will be guided by insights from research in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology that allow us to predict how the universe will unfold over epochs that dwarf the timeline back to the bang. There are significant uncertainties, of course, and like most scientists I live for the possibility that nature will slap down our hubris and reveal surprises we can’t yet fathom. But focusing on what we’ve measured, on what we’ve observed, and on what we’ve calculated, what we’ll find, as laid out in chapters 9 and 10, is not heartening. Planets and stars and solar systems and galaxies and even black holes are transitory. The end of each is driven by its own distinctive combination of physical processes, spanning quantum mechanics through general relativity, ultimately yielding a mist of particles drifting through a cold and quiet cosmos. How will conscious thought fare in a universe experiencing such transformation? The language for asking and answering this question is provided once again by entropy. And by following the entropic trail we will encounter the all-too-real possibility that the very act of thinking, undertaken by any entity of any kind anywhere, may be thwarted by an unavoidable buildup of environmental waste: in the distant future, anything that thinks may burn up in the heat generated by its own thoughts. Thought itself may become physically impossible. While the case against endless thought will be based on a conservative set of assumptions, we will also consider alternatives, possible futures more conducive to life and thinking. But the most straightforward reading suggests that life, and intelligent life in particular, is ephemeral. The interval on the cosmic timeline in which conditions allow for the existence of self-reflective beings may well be extremely narrow. Take a cursory glance at the whole shebang, and you might miss life entirely. Nabokov’s description of a human life as a “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”6 may apply to the phenomenon of life itself. We mourn our transience and take comfort in a symbolic transcendence, the legacy of having participated in the journey at all. You and I won’t be here, but others will, and what you and I do, what you and I create, what you and I leave behind contributes to what will be and how future life will live. But in a universe that will ultimately be devoid of life and consciousness, even a symbolic legacy—a whisper intended for our distant descendants—will disappear into the void. Where, then, does that leave us?

Life is an intoxicating mixture of scenarios we can't control and decisions we make. Chance and choice. Predictable und uncontrollable. I promised myself I'd learn from others' mistakes. Promises are easy to make. Problemm ist, they're also easy to break.

I’ve used an activity in my classrooms before, where I tell my class that we’re going to spend three minutes in complete silence. Nobody can close their eyes and sleep through the three minutes, nor can they busy themselves by reading or scrolling. Instead, we simply sit in silence together for a full three minutes. You should see their eyes when I announce this. I may as well announce that our guest speaker for the day is a greasy, stank-ass hillbilly with a chainsaw and a mask made from the skin of his prior victims. In fact, such a guest “lecture” may be preferable for many. During this time, people behave predictably. The first 30 seconds are the easiest. From 30-45 seconds, everyone contracts a case of the giggles, and students try to stifle themselves. After the one-minute mark, eyes wander, desperately seeking something to occupy their attention. Some count ceiling tiles, others stare out the window at cloud formations, and many discover solace in examining feet. From 90 seconds to the two-minute mark, students visibly squirm in their seats like a crack addict jonesing for a fix, but once we get into the second minute, something remarkable happens. People chill the fuck out. They no longer avoid eye contact with me or one another. They smile quaint little grins. The squirming subsides, they sit up a bit straighter, and the tension hanging heavy in the air like leaded fog dissipates. When the timer on my phone goes off at three minutes, one might assume that someone in the room would shout and break the uncomfortable silence like they’d been holding their breath the whole time, but they don’t. I never rush our entrance back into dialogue; rather, I wait and allow students to speak first. What’s crazy is that, generally speaking, most students go nearly another minute or so before saying anything.

Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn’t involve explicit knowledge. It doesn’t involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can’t explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuition sometimes feels like we have ESP, but it isn’t magical—it’s really a consequence of the experience we’ve built up.

There is a predictable interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we really are all the same, though I can't think of any really first-rate film, play, or book that isn't unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different.

Life is calmness with squabbling, accumulating traditions and self-consciousness. elaborate meals, medicine, law, pretty pictures unspoiled, rocking the cradle and holding the hammer, impressive skies of gray and blue, believing in what we can’t settle, the mystery of iniquity, the absolutely sincere predictions of fools, lighter moods like these.

Listening to our intuition can be scary or extremely daunting. This is because our intuition lives in the space of the unknown. In other words, our intuition is spiritual and operates in the field of infinite possibilities, which by nature is the field of the unknown. We as humans always fear the unknown because we can’t predict what might happen. It is only when we step into the unknown that we can begin to experience the limitless possibilities that life can bring to us. This is why magical things and miracles happen when we trust our intuition. We are literally stepping into the zone of pure possibility. It is for this reason that we only need to know the “what” of what we want to manifest, but not the “how”.

Yesterday is the only thing we can hold onto with certainty. Today and tomorrow are the wild cards in a game we can never fully predict. We can only be sure of where we've been, as today and tomorrow bring possibilities we can't foresee. The past gives us a sense of certainty, a map of where we've been. But today and tomorrow? Are mysteries, unpredictable in their unfolding and often defying our expectations.

The thing to do is supply light and not heat. After all, the earth isn't flat, and if we went too far, we would fall off. Since we can't predict the journey, we must enjoy the tide.

Ethical sluts do not make promises they can't keep. If you are attracted to someone who is looking for a life partnership and what you want is a lighthearted affair (or vice versa), you need to be honest about that, even if it means saying "No, thank you" to sex until your feelings for each other are more on a par. Mistakes can easily be made - sometimes accidentally, and sometimes when we should have predicted that someone would get hurt.

The Berlin Wisdom Project identified five criteria that define wisdom: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, life-span contextualism, relativism of values, and management of uncertainty. The last criterion, I think, is the most important. We live in the age of the algorithm and artificial intelligence, with their tacit promise to manage the uncertainty, the messiness, of life. They have not. If anything, life feels less predictable, and messier, than ever. This is where Stoicism shines. The philosophy’s core teaching—change what you can; accept what you can’t—is appealing in our tumultuous times. Stoicism offers a handrail, a way forward. I knew this, having read Marcus. What I didn’t know was how demanding the philosophy is, and how much fun.

Life's unpredictable course can lead us down paths we never anticipated. We can't always predict where life will take us; it's the unexpected turns that define our journey. n a world often marred by unfairness and pain, Life is so often unfair and painful & you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends, regardless of its brevity or how it eventually fades away. It's the unexpected deviations in life's path that often lead to the most profound experiences.

Consider that your learning goal is the ongoing pursuit of a lifetime of consistent physical movement and self-care. It’s more than just a turn of phrase: It reflects your desire and ability to maintain movement as a part of your hectic life. Life is never stagnant, and as you know by now, we can’t really predict or control it. If you are going to be successful staying physically active and taking care of yourself, you need to learn Strategies that will enable you to prioritize your plans and be consistent, flexible, and creative as you learn to incorporate physical activity into the rest of your dynamic, ever-changing life.

My mind can easily see the instant high it would get from eating burritos because that is part of my old story—it knows what will happen if I do that because I’ve done that thousands of times. I’ve eaten thousands of burritos, and strangely, it’s never ended all that great, but for some reason my mind still wants that predictable, instant, short-lived result of eating a delicious burrito. My mind can’t see what all the results of meditation might be because the possible results that could come from it are beyond my old story and completely unknown. We can’t create a future that is more abundant, more free, or more fulfilling if we keep repeating all the same habits that we’ve learned from our past. This is where a lot of the real work comes in. We often have to experience the momentary feelings of pain that can come from breaking out of our habitual patterns and into something new. It’s like driving on a paved road your entire life and then realizing that road doesn’t take you

My mind can easily see the instant high it would get from eating burritos because that is part of my old story—it knows what will happen if I do that because I’ve done that thousands of times. I’ve eaten thousands of burritos, and strangely, it’s never ended all that great, but for some reason my mind still wants that predictable, instant, short-lived result of eating a delicious burrito. My mind can’t see what all the results of meditation might be because the possible results that could come from it are beyond my old story and completely unknown. We can’t create a future that is more abundant, more free, or more fulfilling if we keep repeating all the same habits that we’ve learned from our past. This is where a lot of the real work comes in. We often have to experience the momentary feelings of pain that can come from breaking out of our habitual patterns and into something new. It’s like driving on a paved road your entire life and then realizing that road doesn’t take you where you want to go, so you have to pull off on to the dirt. In the moment, it seems easier and more comfortable to stay on the paved road, but you’ll never get where you’re trying to go if you do.

chaos in her eyes Sitting with Christine, thinking about the chaos in her eyes, his emotional chaos, plotting to lure her out for a weekend of love, he wished in a chaotic, physical logic,” I wish I could count the number of causes and their probabilities that affect your feelings about me and that will determine what kind of answer I get if I ask you out for a date.” -What? What is that you just said? (An internal voice). By knowing the causes and the probabilities of the order in which they occur, you predict emotions Is that possible? Can we treat human emotions like the weather? Are there sensors to measure our emotions across time points in our history from which we can predict our future actions and their impact on us and others? Is there a computer with enormous capacity that can collect, analyze, and predict them? Do human emotions fall within this randomness? Throughout their history, physicists have rejected the idea of a relationship between human emotions and the surrounding world. Emotions are incomprehensible, they cannot be expected, what cannot be expected cannot be measured, what cannot be measured cannot be formulated into equations, and what cannot be formulated into equations, screw it, reject it, get rid of it, it is not part of this world. These ideas were acceptable to physicists in the past before we knew that we can control the effect of randomness to some extent through control sciences, and predict it by collecting a huge amount of data through special sensors and analyzing it. What affects when a plane arrives? Wind speed and direction? Our motors compensate for this unwanted turbulence. A lightning strike could destroy it? Our lightning rods control this disturbance and neutralize its danger. Running out of fuel? We have fuel meter indicators. Engine failure? We have alternative solutions for an emergency landing. All fall under the category of control sciences, But what about the basic building blocks of an airplane model during its flight? Humans themselves! A passenger suddenly felt dizzy, and felt ill, did the pilot decide to change his destination to the nearest airport? Another angry person caused a commotion, did he cause the flight to be canceled? Our emotions are part of this world, affect it, and can be affected by, interact with. Since we can predict chaos if we have the tools to collect, measure, and analyze it, and since we can neutralize its harmful effects through control science, thus, we can certainly do the same to human emotions as we do with weather and everything else that we have been able to predict and neutralize its undesirable effect. But would we get the desired results? nobody knows… -“Not today, not today, Robert”, he spoke to himself. – If you can’t do it today, you can’t do it for a lifetime, all you have to do now is simply to ask her out and let her chaos of feelings take you wherever she wants. Unconsciously, about to make the request, his phone rang, the caller being his mother and the destination being Tel Aviv. Standing next to Sheikh Ruslan at the building door, this wall fascinated him. -The universe worked in some parts of its paint even to the point of entropy, which it broke, so it painted a very beautiful painting, signed by its greatest law, randomness. If Van Gogh was here, he would not have a nicer one. Sheikh Ruslan knocked on the door, they heard the sound of footsteps behind him, someone opened a small window from it, as soon as he saw the Sheikh until he closed it immediately, then there was a rattle in the stillness of the alley, iron locks opening. Here Robert booked a front-row seat for the night with the absurd, illogic and subconscious.

But when our egos are out of balance due to a barrage of stress hormones, our analytical minds go into high gear and become overstimulated. That’s when the analytical mind is no longer working for us, but against us. We get overanalytical. And the ego becomes highly selfish by making sure that we come first, because that’s its job. It thinks and feels as though it needs to be in control to protect the identity. It tries to have power over outcomes; it predicts what it needs to do to create a certainly safe situation; it clings to the familiar and won’t let go—so it holds grudges, feels pain and suffers, or can’t get beyond its victimhood. It will always avoid the unknown condition and view it as potentially dangerous, because to the ego, the unknown is not to be trusted. And the ego will do anything to empower itself for the rush of addictive emotions. It wants what it wants, and it will do whatever it takes to get there first, by pushing its way to the front of the line. It can be cunning, manipulative, competitive, and deceptive in its protection. So the more stressful your situation, the more your analytical mind is driven to analyze your life within the emotion you’re experiencing at that particular time. When this happens, you’re actually moving your consciousness further away from the operating system of the subconscious mind, where true change can occur. You’re then analyzing your life from your emotional past, although the answers to your problems aren’t within those emotions, which are causing you to think harder within a limited, familiar chemical state. You’re thinking in the box.

All this, in addition to each day’s walking and pushing, is making me a kind of tired I didn’t know existed. But tonight feels different. I have a sense of gratitude I haven’t felt before. The challenge of the day with so much traffic, the fact of Ted leaving us tomorrow, and the communal dinner we experienced tonight have me thinking about what it means to face the challenges of life alone, to take on the unexpected in isolation. I wasn’t designed for a solitary existence. Though I am so very tired, there is an underlying energy in my bones, an energy that comes from the presence and help of others. The unexpected is just that—unexpected! We can’t plan for it . . . we can’t predict it . . . we can’t be ready for it in any way. Often the unforeseen events in life come with few answers or no clear way out. Deborah’s MS offers no way out, and Justin’s disease will eventually take his life. But just like the highway, these unexpected challenges can be faced and life can be lived, despite the darkness. We just have to make sure we don’t face them alone. Ted has helped us get this far. Christie, Lynda, and John have offered to help in the coming days. The many pilgrims sitting, breaking bread, and enjoying wine tonight remind me of what the church is supposed to mean, what it is supposed to represent. We are a community—or at least we should be—where all are welcome, all are loved, and the unexpected challenges of life are faced with others at our side.

Fear is not a citronella candle; scary life happenings are not mosquitoes. They happen in ways we can't predict, control, or understand. The only guaranteed outcome of feeling scared all the time is that you will feel scared all the time.

There’s no first place or last place here. Life is not a competition. Often people use money and the acquisition of things to measure where they stand: who’s got the nicer house, the fancier car, the summer home in the Hamptons. But the truth is, we can’t predict how long we’ll live or the state of our health as we age. The reality is, it doesn’t matter where we start. It’s how we finish that counts.

Seeing them together makes me want to open myself up to the future, but hard as I try, I still can’t imagine myself growing old, alone or with anyone else. To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing—this is my constant work. I can’t know if there is a rogue cancer cell lurking somewhere in my marrow. I can’t predict if my body will scuttle commitments to myself or to others. I’m not even sure I want to settle down in a stable, more conventional way. But I’m beginning to understand this: We never know. Life is a foray into mystery.

The climate models are crude in space and they’re crude in time,” he continues. “So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.” There are several reasons for this, Myhrvold explains. Today’s models use a grid of cells to map the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modeling software, which would require more computing power. “We’re trying to predict climate change twenty to thirty years from now,” he says, “but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job.

When our life becomes unpredictable and uncertain, we pray as we can’t predict the important events of life. If you are in a business or profession where luck plays an important role, you regularly pray to God for good luck. Students pray for good luck before their examinations. The villagers pray for a good, timely monsoon or adequate supply of electricity.

I can't change my skin-tone, You change your mindset." GIST OF THE QUOTE - It is stories that keep us going in life, not the traditional masculinity. Endings are never predictable like fables of hare and tortoise and others. : Our true form is not on gender or DNA of our chromosomes but on the freedom. The freedom of mind, voice, and expression. Our powers are not in strength, my strength maybe silences also. : As we live our story we realize our actual strength - my strength is persistence, positivity, and pride. : What is that gives you strength, woman? : : "In so long, I hadn’t sung a song My voice changed, Blended into a storm " : : #harshadapathare #women #womenquotes #empowerment #genderequality #genderrace #racethesun #womenpower #girlpower

Stoicism suggests that one should try to maintain the following balance: an awareness that the things we are worried about could and very likely might happen – that life will contain moments of tragedy and sharp turns – and that we should be prepared for these moments, both mentally and practically, in any way we can. However, equally important is recognizing that many of these sorts of catastrophic moments, can’t be known nor controlled nor predicted and thus, after a point, worrying has none. Once one has done everything that is rationally and realistically preventative, they should work to revert their attention back to the present, leaving all additional concern about the future, for the future. Awareness and rational preparation have value to the future at low cost to the present. But worrying about what one cannot know nor control of the future has no value to either and comes at the cost of the present. Following the Stoic way of thinking to potentially help counter this unnecessary anxiety and bring our attention and enjoyment back to the present, we can remind ourselves that in the future, things might not be ok, but if they might not be, then they are now. Or at least better than the future version we are worried about. If we are worried that things will only get worse, then things are as good as they’ll ever be right now. And how foolish it would be to ruin what might be ok now out of concern of things potentially not being so later if one cannot know or do anything further to prevent it? And better yet, if one is wrong about what they’re fearful, then things will only get better. And there is even less reason to worry. Moreover, we tend to assume the worst. We tend to worry not only about things going wrong but the worst cases of things going wrong, paired with a sense that in the face of such cases, we would be broken and ruined, beyond repair. However, how often is this actually true? Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” Epictetus similarly wrote, “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.” In all likeliness, there is someone somewhere right now living some version of a seemingly worst-case scenario for many of us, living with no phone, computer, TV, and a great many other things, unaware of this video and perhaps a huge portion of the happenings of the world. And he or she is likely just as happy or unhappy as many of us right now. We are adaptable creatures, wired to adjust our worries to our circumstances, as well as our abilities to remain ok in the face of them. And it is perhaps of great use to consider and meditate on this idea frequently and with confidence. That even if some version of nearly worst-case, we would likely still be some form of ok. The ingredients of your being that have gotten you where you are, that have given you what you’ve experienced, will still remain. To paraphrase Roman statesman, and philosopher Cicero, while one still breathes, one still has hope. At least in some form.

They’re predictable, but isn’t that what’s so great about them? There’s no anxiety over what’s going to happen—they’re just feel-good movies.” “Yes,” I say excitedly. “Thank you. That’s what I try to tell people who scoff at them. Is it so wrong for us to just be happy while watching something? Do we always have to be thinking? Do we always have to be depressed? Do we always have to participate in entertainment that highlights drugs, abuse . . . sexual assault? Life is hard enough as it is. Why can’t we just escape that and enjoy something that doesn’t sprinkle us with a heavy dose of depression afterward?

Life isn’t about what happens to us, Dallas, because things are going to happen. Rich, poor, good parents, bad parents, no matter what, we can’t predict other people. If I can’t change it or prevent it, then I don’t think about it. Just adapt when it happens, and remember how lucky I am to breathe at all