I jotted down these words on a piece of paper the evening of the 2nd day. The first day was about settling down, and not leaving. The second day was when I started thinking about how to make something of my time there, and what I needed to do.

Just as I didn’t ask for my blessings, I didn’t ask for my faults. But, just as I enjoy my blessings without question, I must also strive to overcome my challenges, also without question.

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Some may say I left and went on an adventure. The cold reality is that I merely escaped into a world I created. Buying land is just the first step to creating my own world, but it won’t change the fact that I haven’t figured out how to live, thrive, and be happy in this one.

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I went to a meditation session today. The guy said we must learn to become independent of our egos. He said our egos manifest themselves in our desire to control externalities. Instead, we must control ourselves, overcome our fears and crutches, and adapt to our external world as it is.

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I am nobody. Anonymous, unremarkable. I can vanish now, and nobody will notice. The only way to change that is to engage.

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I’m trying to change. Baby steps, I tell myself. I try not to avoid eye contact. I say “hi.” I ask strangers what’s going on at this exhibit. Maybe tomorrow I’ll introduce myself to someone.

As I wrote in the previous post, I had considerable success in changing how I interacted with my environment. But it was a struggle to get there, and I thought it was worth posting the words as they were written at the time.