Here's a nice image for a life in balance,” she said. “You're juggling these four balls that you've named work, family, friends, spirit. Now, work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it bounces back. The other balls they're made of glass.”“I've dropped a few of those glass balls in my day. Sometimes they chip, sometimes they shatter to pieces.

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls...are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.

Good memories are like charms...Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.

But what is life if you don't live it?

Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.

There you have it: our lives in a nutshell. Emphasis on nut.

Regret is a waste of time.

Im a girl who has been tamping down her emotions and keeping them tightly guarded her whole life. And that works really well for me... And now I felt like my shell had a dangerous crack in it. Without much more effort on his part, it would split wide open and my enormous river of emotions would gush out - the bad and the good. It was pretty much the scariest thing I'd ever thought of." - Maximum Ride.

If you're going to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now...Things are almost never as bad as they first seem. Loosen up, girlfriend... you could giggle more in real life.