The Best Advice

The best advice you’ve gotten is advice you haven’t gotten yet—or possibly, advice you’ve gotten but do not yet understand.

Where does the future live?

We all know it’s real. Even dividing this line from the last line and the line after connotes some form of time passing—you can see what was already written, and see what you’ve yet to read.

Oh, and that’s peanuts: you’ve got a whole day to consider. You’re stuck with the double task of not only living your day, but right now, projecting yourself forward into it—setting some kind of intention for your time, manners, actions, and thoughts.

There is the additionally awkward part where there’s a whole other day after this one—weeks and months to consider then live then consider again. A never ending series of fastballs and (far too many) curveballs thrown no matter what we do.

It’s why “the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten” is a hard question to quantify—because advice is fundamentally concerned with the future, and we’re stuck here in the present.

Because while we know the past can help us figure out the present, we don’t know in what ways.

So this is the best piece of advice today can offer you: the best piece of advice you’ll ever get is still in the future, because only in the future will you know how that advice plays out.

It also makes advice a form of invitation—not dogma telling you what to do and what to avoid, but instead, opportunity. An endless series of stones to turn over looking for something—anything—that could help us all out.

Yourself included.

Plus if you’ve already gotten the best possible piece of advice you’ll ever get, why keep listening to any other advice at all?

Morning Reading is a daily email to help center yourself, reflect, and prepare for the day. It’s sent with love from your friend, Zach in Austin, Texas. He even drew the logo himself.

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