*Typing*

The hurt shouldn’t worry you. The hurt is good. The hurt is an indication the wear and tear of living hasn’t stripped away the feeling.

You should only worry when it stops hurting. You should only worry when you feel nothing at all. You should only worry when the day after Christmas doesn’t kill you, when the turbulence 10,000 feet in the air doesn’t kill you, when the old photographs of your grandmother in her Kimono doesn’t kill you, when the thought of your mother and father dying doesn’t kill you.

You should only worry when there is nothing left inside of you to break; when there’s so much scar tissue laced around your heart and your soul, you couldn’t eat through it with a chainsaw. Then and only then should you worry.

Otherwise, you should be thankful for the hurt. You should welcome the hurt with open arms. You should smile with tears in your eyes and you should say, “Come here, old friend.” You should not pray away the hurt. Never pray away the hurt.

Pray for hurt you can take. Pray for hurt you can take without losing the ability to feel and to love and to cry and to laugh yourself to beautiful madness in the face of death that wants nothing more than to bury you.

Askida Ekmek is an ancient Turkish tradition that translates to “bread on the hook".

When purchasing a loaf of bread from a baker, the customer may choose to purchase a second loaf for a stranger in need. The baker will then bag this second loaf and hang it from a hook in the bakery.

Later in the day, someone short on money will ask "Askida ekmek var mi?" or "Is there bread on the hook?" and the baker will give them a loaf for free.

When money allows, pay it forward.

Writing is like fishing in that you've got to have the patience to sit still long enough for serendipity to happen.

Writers are terribly superstitious. You catch a few sentences in the same place a few days in a row and suddenly you keep returning to that place certain there is a special kind of creative magic that surrounds it.

Like fishing, the writing process is boring so you have to romanticize it. Nobody in their right mind would ever fish strictly for the fish. People fish for all the shit that happens when they're not catching fish. This is how it is with writing.

You pour yourself a cup of black coffee, preferably in a heavy ceramic mug. You find a good place by a window. You cast your eyes out of it and let your mind wander. Sometimes you sit there for hours. Other times, minutes.

Eventually, you feel a snag and this becomes your first sentence.

Happiness is a mental and emotional state where absolutely nothing is missing. However, because we are humans with desires, it's nearly impossible to be completely happy all of the time.

Desires come with the cost of happiness. When we desire something, we're postponing a portion of our happiness until we have what we desire.

It's this idea of, "I will be happy when..."

The answer, of course, isn't to forfeit desires. We can't. Nor should we. There is a degree of confidence, joy and achievement we experience when will a desire into existence.

But, we have to be extraordinarily careful not to desire too much at once. We desire too many things at one time and we stop feeling happy, content and at home in our own lives.

We should have but one desire at a time and we should pursue it with the tenacity of a starving dog. Everywhere else, we should look through the lenses of gratitude and see that nothing is missing.

We try everything. We take our vitamins. We say our prayers. We get our palms read. We check our horoscopes. We read self-help. We exhaust ourselves in a desperate attempt to control what happens to us, white-knuckling our lives until we've squeezed every ounce of joy from them.

With time, we realize our false sense of control is nothing more than paper mâché. It's here where we redirect our energy towards something we can control: our perception.

We realize our energy is far better spent not so much controlling what happens to us but instead controlling how we choose to feel about what happens to us.

This is the tremendous magic in being human. We have complete governance over our perception. We can't control the thing but we can control the meaning of the thing.