July 21 | Your Opinion

Life does not require your opinion. 

The simple course of logic would tell us that it’s impossible to have an opinion about everything—only the narrow list of things we have the luxury of experiencing.

You could stand for a few brief seconds in the halls of a library and, without even looking, feeling the oppressing weight of the words around you, the millions of pages you will never have the time to read, the billions of hours that went into their writing, their editing, their printing, their binding. 

Still broader are the number of hours beyond. The lives of all of those who have shared spaces with you, and who live so beyond the reach of your every day that you’ll never even bump into the same molecule of air, each with their own decisions, choices, ways of being.

The real secret is not just that they don’t require an opinion, but that they don’t even require a reaction at all. 

Which means for all things—near and far, big and small, positive and negative, life-giving or destroying—you can decide not only what your opinion is, but whether or not to have an opinion, and not only whether or not to have an opinion, but whether or not you want to react at all.… Read the rest