When we primarily lead our life following our heart rather than our mind, the beauty of the world reveals itself in innumerable ways.

Love, present within every life, is shared unconditionally, making life easier, more meaningful, for both ourselves and those we sincerely share our love with.

Choose to follow the more challenging path through life, the path of the heart, opening your world to discovering genuine happiness, infinite love, and true meaning in your life as well.

Peace is not finally arriving at a life with no uncertainty. Peace is learning that uncertainty does not have to steal this moment from you.”

We sometimes say to ourselves:

I'll relax when this problem is solved.

I'll enjoy myself when I'm financially secure.

I'll feel peaceful when I know what comes next.

But life keeps moving the finish line.

One uncertainty disappears and another eventually takes its place.

Perhaps peace isn't waiting at the end of uncertainty. Perhaps peace is something we learn to carry while walking through it and walking the path one step at a time. You can still make plans. You can still work hard. You can still want better. But you don't have to sacrifice today to prove that you care about tomorrow.

In Daoism one is taught to flow with the current of life. A river doesn't require the landscape to become flat before it flows peacefully. Mountains, rocks and unexpected bends will appear on the river path. And still the river remains a river and continues to flow.

Your mind can create a hundred tomorrows before breakfast. But reality only give you one place where you can actually live. And the place is here...this moment.

“We judge our past decisions based on knowledge we gained only years later.”

— Magdalena, A Phased Approach to Life

I wrote this while reflecting on how often I judge an earlier version of myself using things I learned much later.

In a project, we accept that the first phase cannot include everything learned in later phases. Yet we often expect exactly that of ourselves. Our past decisions were made with different information, experience, and understanding. We can take responsibility and keep the lesson without endlessly putting our past selves on trial.

What helps you learn from a decision without continually reliving it?

Source: my essay “A Phased Approach to Life” on Magdalena’s Digest:

https://magdalenasdigest.com/2026/07/15/a-phased-approach-to-life/

A single act of unconditional love shared with another may awaken in them their love as well.

By selflessly sharing our love with others, without motive or benefit, we can amplify our love exponentially, as that person may then share their love with the next, ad infinitum.

To bring genuine change to a self-centered world, perhaps we may each begin by simply sharing a single act of love.

In our last conversation, we explored healing as an ongoing architectural project and how a deliberate shift toward a growth mindset can literally rewrite our emotional wiring and prove that our past does not dictate our future. We talked about how scars are proof that we survived, and how we can stop letting old hurts anchor us to yesterday.

But that raises a natural question: what happens to the weight of the suffering itself?

For a long time, we view healing as a process of learning how to carry heavy baggage without dropping it. We imagine ourselves walking down a long road, shoulders permanently hunched under the accumulated weight of grief, betrayal, and heartbreak, simply getting stronger at enduring the strain.

The beauty of true healing, however, is that it completely transforms what "carrying" even means.

If healing simply meant returning to who we were before we were hurt, it would be an exhausting, Sisyphean task. We would spend our lives trying to restore an older, more fragile version of ourselves. But suffering doesn't leave us where it found us; it forces us to expand.

Think about how nature responds to pressure. When a bone breaks and heals properly, the body weaves dense, reinforced tissue at the site of the fracture, making that specific area remarkably strong. When a tree survives a brutal storm or a harsh winter, its trunk thickens and its roots drive deeper into the earth. The ring inside the wood permanently marks the year of the drought, but the tree grows taller and sturdier because of the resilience it was forced to discover.

Human emotional architecture works the exact same way.

When deep suffering occurs, our old container for life often shatters simply because it was too small to hold the weight of what happened. For a while, we feel broken. But as we process, learn, and lean into our capacity to evolve, we don't just glue the pieces back together in the exact same shape. We build a vastly larger soul.

We cultivate deeper empathy, richer gratitude, clearer vision, and an astonishing capacity for joy that we might never have accessed in comfortable, unbroken weather.

We do not merely learn to carry the same old weight with tired shoulders. Instead, the weight becomes a tiny fraction of a much larger, stronger, and more beautiful self. The past stays the same size, but you become vast.

In that expansion, suffering ceases to be a heavy burden you drag behind you like an anchor. It becomes the very soil from which your wisdom, tenderness, and grace bloom. You don't just carry it, you outgrow its power to define you, leaving behind something profoundly whole and infinitely luminous.

Have hope, all you weary and broken. You may be tired today, but you are not finished yet. The best parts of your story are still taking root.

We all wish to find love, happiness, inner peace, and meaning in our life.

Though we may experience these emotions briefly, changes in our life circumstances often cause them to vanish.

Enduring love, happiness, inner peace, and meaning will only manifest themselves when they are selflessly shared to benefit all others.

For more like this check out:
www.instagram.com/matthew.harris.writer

Every person we meet affects both of our lives.

A small part of our soul remains within each of us.

Every one of us can therefore change the world by selflessly sharing our innate wisdom and unconditional love to help awaken others.

They then, may do the same with all those they meet in their lives as well, helping to spread the circle of love around the world.

Everybody needs three bones in their body:

A wishbone so you can dream big and believe in possibilities.

A backbone so you can stand tall and face life's challenges with courage and resilience.

A funny bone so you can laugh, find joy, and enjoy the journey along the way.

We all have two lives; the second begins when you realize you only have one.

There's a short passage in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius describes the kind of steadiness he's actually after, and it's not what people usually picture when they imagine staying calm. He pictures a rock standing in rough water, waves slamming into it constantly, and says the rock doesn't stop the waves, it just stands there and the sea eventually quiets down around it. What gets me about this image is that he didn't pick calm water as the metaphor, he picked a rock still getting hit. The waves don't stop coming just because you've gotten steadier, they keep arriving the same as always. What changes is that they stop being able to move you the way they used to. That's a pretty different picture than the usual idea of peace as the absence of difficulty. It's closer to being difficult-proof than difficulty-free, which honestly sounds more achievable and a lot less fragile. It also means you don't need the waves to stop in order to call yourself steady, you just need to still be standing after the last one hit. What's something you're still getting hit by regularly that doesn't throw you the way it used to?

I used to think if something mattered, I had to hold on tight to it.

People.

Plans.

A version of life I thought I was supposed to have.

But after divorce and having to rebuild parts of my life, I’m learning that not everything is meant to be forced.

Some things I can care about and still let breathe.

Some things I can want and still not lose myself trying to make them happen.

I’m trying to stay open without chasing everything.

And when something good does show up, I want to be present enough to actually receive it.

A poem I wrote about becoming a better person…

The weight of who you used to be
Does not belong to you today.
Old habits from which you tried to flee
Are slowly starting to give way.

You do not need a sudden spark
To turn your entire life around.
Just one small lantern through the dark,
One forward step on solid ground.

Forgive the years you gave to doubt,
The promises that fell apart.
A quiet life is built without
The shame you carry in your heart.

Show up and do the simple deed,
Stand taller than you did before.
Plant one sincere, deliberate seed,
And leave the old self at the door.

You are worth it.