God Wants Us To Be In Joy,

I Went To Shea Stadium And Used The Men's Room. Terrifying. There Was This Little Kid Looking At Me Through The Crack [in The Stall]. And I Was Like, "if You Tell Anyone What You've Seen..."

They Say That There Are Three Kinds Of People In The World. There Are People Who Never Learn One Way Or Another Anything; There Are People Who Learn From Their Own Mistakes, Eventually And With Great Pain; And Then There Are The Really Wise People Who Learn From Other People's Mistakes And Spare Themselves The Suffering.

God Isn't Interested In Watching You Enact Some Performance Of Personality In Order To Comply With Some Crackpot Notion You Have About How A Spiritual Person Looks Or Behaves. We All Seem To Get This Idea That, In Order To Be Sacred, We Have To Make Some Massive, Dramatic Change Of Character, That We Have To Renounce Our Individuality.

I'd Learned Enough From Life's Experiences To Understand That Destiny's Interventions Can Sometimes Be Read As Invitation For Us To Address And Even Surmount Our Biggest Fears. It Doesn't Take A Great Genius To Recognize That When You Are Pushed By Circumstance To Do The One Thing You Have Always Most Specifically Loathed And Feared, This Can Be, At The Very Least, An Interesting Growth Opportunity.

We Gallop Through Our Lives Like Circus Performers Balancing On Two Speeding Side-by-side Horses--one Foot Is On The Horse Called "fate," The Other On The Horse Called "free Will." And The Question You Have To Ask Every Day Is--which Horse Is Which? Which Horse Do I Need To Stop Worrying About Because It's Not Under My Control, And Which Do I Need To Steer With Concentrated Effort?