We cannot replicate other people’s lives. We must each institute and broker a personalized meaning to our exclusive existence. We must each serve as our own Zen master, awaken to our inviolate personal truth, and strive to fulfill our sui generis (unique) nature.

Life goes on without regard to our whims. What we make of life is what counts, how we address the challenges in our lives determines our respective levels of personal accomplishment and happiness.

Every form of life must struggle. Life is an aberration; death is ordinary. Life requires obstruction, conflict, reverses, and resolve. Life requires questing. Questing provides the meaning that we seek, a purpose to justify the inevitable struggle to live knowing the absurdity that we must die.

The song in our heart ultimately sustains us. Each of us possesses the ability to choose how we perceive life, determine what attitudes and viewpoint to endorse, and assign meaning to personal existence.

The greatest fear that human beings experience is not death, which is inevitable, but consideration of the distinct possibility of living a worthless life.

Narcissistic pleasure seekers routinely avoid developing the humility required to manufacture a life of full measure. Shallow persons such as me hide their insecurities behind a false persona of bravado, boasting of their inconsequential deeds, pyrrhic victories, and adamant refusals to tackle any task that they fear.

We foster personal meaning out of life by exulting in all of nature, exhibiting a reverence for people, animals, plants, and by expressing compassion and sympathy for the entire community of life.

A person achieves enlightenment only through a purposeful engagement with life and by resolutely searching for truth and shedding artifices.

Life is the one riddle that is denotative, referential. Although every person shares a common ultimate destiny, each person must work out their own life, script their own personal salvation, and wrestle with the fear and trembling that is inherent when we consider our mortality.