Don't go," she whispered, her eyes closed. It was all happening too fast. She couldn't give Daniel up. Not yet. She didn't think she ever could.
I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
Our choices add up; each one influences others, and cumulatively a series of delightful short-term choices can leave us much worse off in the long run.
At least one study of blocked writers has found that they were more productive and more creative when they were essentially forced to write instead of scribbling only when the mood struck them.
In the modern world, self-control buys a good life indeed. Having self-control to spare is rare enough nowadays that the marketplace lavishes huge rewards on society's scary new self-control elite, those lords of discipline who not only withstood all that boring stuff in graduate school, but keep themselves thin by carefully regulating what they eat after flogging themselves off to the gym at the crack of dawn. It's as if they got the news ahead of the rest of us-no doubt by waking up earlier-that self-control may well be the most important trait of the twenty-first century.
Exercising self-restraint can be depleting, yet it can also be ennobling.
Be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved or untrained to stand the test.
When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.
I like to see the glass as half full, hopefully of jack daniels.
While we don't have much say over the desires that we have, we certainly can decide which we prefer-and then search for ways to act on that basis.