Your life is a long hallway, with thousands if not millions of doors. Some are wide open. Some are closed, but could be opened with a little effort. Some are locked and barred. What’s behind each door is different.

Everyone has different doors that are open, closed, or locked. Some people have many more closed doors than others, and that isn’t fair, but it is what it is.

No matter what someone’s hallways looks like, there will always be some people who insist on bashing their heads against the locked doors, convinced that what’s behind them is utopia. Sight unseen.

The secret to a happy life is exploring the open or openable doors until you find one you like, and walking through it.

Tools aren’t evil. A chemist can make a poison or they can make sunscreen with the same lab. Letters can be configured into words that bring joy or sorrow. Money can buy food and shelter, or weapons of war.

They’re tools. Our hands and minds are tools, too.

People fear tools because they don’t understand minds. They think that the evil is contained in the sword, not in the hand that weilds it and the heart that drives the hand. They think hatred is housed in the words spoken, not in the mind that willed the mouth to speak.

Humans have great capacity for honor and evil both. They also have tremendous ingenuity, and will use that ingenuity to make tools that further their goals, righteous and evil alike. To attempt to be ever-vigilant against the wrong tools is to fight a fool’s war, and to lose it. The battle for the hearts of mankind must be won there, as well.

The greatest escape hatch for an unpleasant conversation ever made is: “You’re right.”

I see people trying to end arguments by starting new ones, trying to bypass an impasse by saying things like “You’re too stubborn to argue with,” or “Why am I wasting my time with you?” That’s silly!

Even seemingly diplomatic statements like “I think we’re at an impasse,” or “Agree to disagree,” don’t really do what you want them to. What you want is to end a fruitless conversation. You probably want to do that because you aren’t convinced by the other person’s statements and you realize they won’t be convinced by yours. So what’s the point of doing any more talking?

If you just say, “You’re right,” the conversation is over. If the person is your friend, they still are. Nothing changes. If it was a stranger you were arguing with (and if so… why?) then who cares if they walk away thinking they convinced you? The important thing is that they walk away!

Pride is dumb, especially when it makes your life worse. Just cheerfully say, “You’re right!”

I wonder how many words I’ve written? Not just here, but… everywhere? Every story, every email, every jotted note. Which words have I never written? Which words have I never read?

Maybe someday I’ll reckon.

I have never complained about something out loud and had a positive result.

Sure, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But there are better ways to ask than to just complain and hope somebody both correctly interprets your needs and feels magnanimous enough to make your problem into theirs.

And yes, you should talk about your feelings and worries! But you should do so with trusted friends, loved ones, or professionals. You shouldn’t just broadcast it to the public.

Why not? Because negativity invites more negativity. Pain competitions, disapproval, unkind mockery – these are all the demons you open the door for. I don’t feel like dealing with that, do you?

I’m not saying bottle it up! I’m just saying to mind your context. Grousing never helped anyone.

It’s not weakness to lean on someone. Have you ever built a teepee? You lean a few sticks together and it’s way stronger than just trying to balance one stick on its end.

It isn’t about steely-jawed independence, people. It’s about structural integrity.

If you love going to strip clubs, then it will be difficult for you to also put your energy into your local church community. This isn’t a judgment about where and how you should spend your time; rather, this is a simple truth. You only have so much passion within you. Just as you can’t spend the same dollar in two different vending machines, you can’t spend the same passion in two different places. And the more those places conflict, the harder the split will be.

If you’re truly passionate about two different things, but those things have a lot of compatibility, the split is easier. Imagine that your two great passions are, for example, your spouse and your child. Those are very compatible passions! Energy spent on one will frequently spill over into the other. Any married couple with a young child will tell you that you still have to be conscious of the split, of course. Before having the child, you had 100% of your energy and passion to spend on your partner, and now some – probably the lion’s share, at least at first! – will go to the child. So even in the most compatible pairing, you have to portion out your energy.

When the pairing is very incompatible, like in the passion for both strip clubs and your church, a good bit of your energy is going to be lost simply in the cognitive dissonance. The rationalizing and self-justification necessary will consume lots of energy, not to mention what you spend on conversational misdirection, hiding, or outright lies.

The point is, if you really care about something, you have to be aware of what else is using your budget of energy and make some hard choices. When you want to have a baby, it’s time to have a vulnerable, honest conversation about what you and your spouse expect from each other after the fact. And it’s definitely time to stop going to the strip club.

There is a difference between fighting a disease and improving your health, whether we’re talking about mental or physical. Physically, it’s easier to understand. If you’re sick or injured, you need discrete, specific treatment, but you wouldn’t just take antibiotics or wear a cast all the time, hoping it would improve your overall health. If you wish to improve your baseline physical health, you need to live a healthier lifestyle – better diet, more physical activity, etc.

The same is true of mental health, but we don’t tend to acknowledge it. People can have trauma, grief, or anguish that needs to be healed, but the treatments that work for those aren’t the same as the treatments that will just make you happier or more satisfied with your life overall. If you suffer a specific traumatic event, for example, you should absolutely seek professional counseling, therapy, or the like to help you work past it. But if you’re just sad in general, the same type of professional service isn’t going to help you any more than wearing a cast will help you be physically healthier.

If you suffer a particularly grievous physical injury, you may have a scar long after you’re fully healed. Some scars are permanent, and that’s just the way it is. The same is true for mental health. If you suffer a particularly traumatic event, you may have the mental “scar” for the rest of your life, even after you’ve healed the actual trauma. But we mistake scars for current injuries frequently when discussing mental health, to the point where we often don’t acknowledge that mental injuries can be healed at all. We see a traumatic event as permanent damage, instead of something you can heal from.

This leads us to another type of error, which is believing that anything other than a high level of baseline happiness and contentment must be from specific traumas. People are sad, so they think they need to be “cured.” But being cured is not the same as being healthy. A person with no physical injuries or diseases can be very unhealthy if they live a physically unhealthy lifestyle. The same is true for your mental health. If you’re feeling sad, lethargic, or dissatisfied, that doesn’t mean you need to heal your trauma. It means you need to meditate more, get outside frequently, drink more water, meditate, spend time with your loved ones, and do purposeful work.

Lifestyle interventions and convalescence go hand in hand in maintaining our health, both physical and mental (which are of course also related). You will be injured or sick multiple times in your life, and when that happens, you should absolutely seek the appropriate curative care. But the rest of the time, you need to focus on the life choices that create a healthy mind and body, because “healthy” isn’t the default. You need to work for it.

The other day I stopped at a gas station to use the air pump to inflate one of my tires. The air pump sits between two parking spots designated for the purpose; a man was in one of the spots already, filling his tires, so I pulled into the other one to wait my turn. While he filled his tires, I chatted with him for a moment and then took the hose from him when he was finished.

While I was filling my tire, he pulled out and drove off, and a new car pulled into the now-vacant spot. The man in that car hadn’t even fully parked yet when he rolled down his window and began cursing at me. He started calling me unkind names and said that he was there first. Of course, by this point, I was already putting air in my tire. In retrospect, what I imagine must have happened is that the man didn’t realize there were two spots and was waiting for the first car to leave, which is a perfectly honest mistake to make. I wasn’t in any particular rush; had he caught me before I was already mid-fill I’d have just let him go first.

I just said, “Sorry about that, be done in just a sec!” He continued to scream and yell the entire sixty or so seconds it took me to fill my tire. When I was done, I walked over and cheerfully said “All done! Here you go,” and attempted to hand him the hose. Fuming, he said “Just put it back in the holder.” So I did! Then I said “take it easy,” and got back in my car.

As I started my car and buckled up, he gestured for me to roll down my window. I did, and with a sigh he said, “I apologize for that. I don’t normally behave that way, and I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

I said: “Everyone has a rough day. I’m sorry too if I disrupted your day. Have a good one.” He smiled, and I left.

A lot of times, when someone is aggressive or rude to you for no reason, you won’t get a resolution like this, even if you’re as kind as you can be. Maybe one time in twenty will you get a satisfactory moment to provide catharsis to such an encounter. But you’ll get it zero times in twenty if you match aggression with aggression. No amount of return rudeness would have made me feel better in the long run, and there is no happy ending to that scene if I’d screamed back. Even if he hadn’t apologized, my heart would have been better off knowing I might have planted the seed for a moment like that in the future, even if I didn’t get to see it.

There is a person I used to be, who would have scowled and raged at this post. Good.

I have a very easy time dealing with most situations I don’t enjoy. I can “check out” mentally and perform most routine tasks on autopilot, entertaining myself in my mind very easily. I used to love chores like mowing the lawn as a kid for this reason; walking in straight lines was pretty easy to do without paying attention to it, and my mental holodeck was a fine playground.

The downside to this is that I don’t do very well when the situation I don’t want to be in requires my active participation. It’s easy for me not to be bored, but it’s far more difficult (for example) for me to participate in a conversation I don’t want to have. If the person I’m unwillingly talking to requires more than occasional nods and affirmative grunts, my energy drains rapidly.

Most of the time, this isn’t a huge problem. I arrange my life in such a way that I mostly don’t do stuff I don’t want to, and it’s pretty great. But no one can pull this off 100% of the time, so it’s good to practice a little perspective. I try to focus on the positive outcomes of my active participation, rather than the situation itself. It’ll do, when autopilot won’t.