The work of choosing.

This is the best thing I've read this year. Maybe longer, since it's the first week of January and all.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

David Foster Wallace via the Hairpin, on a post that mentioned "the work of choosing," which I originally thought was going to be what my mom calls "picking your battles," but is something a little different. The Hairpin post (and the linked previous one about setting boundaries) are pretty much nice life goals, too.

Remember when Thomas Merton asked, how do you tell people they are walking around shining like the sun? Well, here's the question. How do you choose to notice that people are walking around shining like the sun? This is the work of knowing who we are. Ah, adult life.