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Self, Past, Nature

Know what you are.  Live without dreams and without pride.  Do not boast, do not savor your accomplishments.  Enjoy what you enjoy, recognize that you enjoy it, and build that into happiness.

 Try to divine from your feelings if you are healthy, and if it is health, thrive -- but if it is not health, make amends.  Nature should show you the way: a sick body makes itself known.  A sick mind is restless.

The difficult thing is to establish the proper habits.  Many things that seem impossible at first can become second nature, but you must struggle to make them become so.

As for the past, it is not good to dwell on it -- at least as a comparison.  Either you will feel nostalgia when you think on happiness that is now past, or you will feel humiliation at your failures.  The only proper way to think of the past is as a kind of lesson.  If it does not teach you what you should do, it teaches you what you are.

Knowing what you are is a way of moderating your dreams.  Knowing what you are allows you to be humble. If you know what you are, you know where nature is leading you: knowing what you are allows you to aim for and be what you are -- and that is the path to happiness.  You may flinch when you look at yourself in the mirror -- the way children flinch before receiving a shot.  It is bitter, but it is medicine.  Possibility is what troubles us.  The past is the remedy for this feeling of possibility: it teaches us actuality.

All the mistakes you have made stem from your nature.  Those were the routes you took to express yourself in the circumstances that you encountered.  Your nature impelled you to them -- only, you could not know whether there your nature would find a clear avenue or else would find itself blocked up.  Your nature expresses itself in desire, and through your whole life you will find that you have always followed your desires.

Every desire is in itself natural, and every pleasure is in itself good.  But your nature is not a single desire, and it does not express itself in a single pleasure.  Your nature is a system of desires and your happiness is a system of pleasures.  Nature leads the way, but it cannot achieve everything by itself.  The different desires must be harmonized with each other: no one must be allowed to dominate.  Some pleasures are short lived; others are deceptive.  Nature must be fit into the mold of experience to keep itself from destroying itself.

When you examine your past, you see the results of a nature allowed freely to run its course, and you learn how and where to rein that nature in.  Nature is a wilderness; happiness is a garden.  The gardener channels nature's fertile impulse into an orderly habitat.  The gardener must constantly separate nature from itself in order to allow nature to thrive.

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