If you are like most people, you mentioned anger. Or guilt. Or envy. Or pride. Or resentment. Or sadness.

None of those emotions is inherently a bad one. All emotions do is show you something you might otherwise be missing.

Anger shows you where you have cared, since you rarely get angry about something you don’t care about. Envy shows you an unresolved insecurity hiding in plain sight. Guilt (and sometimes shame) show you where there is a gap between the values you claim to hold yourself to, and what you did.

In some cases, two or more of these emotions dance together to give you a cocktail. Resentment shows you how fear and sadness and dishonesty are living rent-free in your relationship. Communication is a pipe that emotions flow through; resentment shows you that that pipe is clogged because one of you is afraid to have that talk.

Many of these emotions are difficult to process. So many don’t.

Instead, we restrict ourselves from feeling the anger and allow it to devolve. We turn anger into a bad fuel that burns us up from the inside.

Restricting an emotion drains us more than the emotion itself.

If we choose to do the difficult work of sitting with those feelings, feeling them through without resisting any, without directing any at others, then we get to enjoy the beauty they’ve been masking all along.

Feeling sadness helps us get better. Blocking it only blocks you from feeling joy.

They created what we now know as poetic license, to give themselves space and room to write beyond the edges. To create words that never existed. To say things in ways that had never been said before because our shared language was restrictive and didn’t know better.

Because of poetic license, we learnt how to love better and express love better. We learnt to code and decode. We chose different paths to rhythm and creativity. We learnt to craft beauty in strings of words. Our love for language grew; we built different taste buds and sat with our favourites.

We showed ourselves what was possible.

The Chinese calls this “诗的破格” (shī de pò gé) meaning poetic rule-breaking. It implies that you know what your group considers right and wrong. And you intentionally find a way to express the beauty of art beyond those constraints.

Isn’t that a good metaphor for living the life you want? Isn’t that a good metaphor for a life worth living?

Caring is human. Not caring dampens our capacity to feel, to love, to open our hearts to how we show up in the world.

That’s too much power to hand over to someone else. Instead, I care…a lot. Enough to know that you can care about someone without making them decide when you care or not.

Just as much as I care to guard my heart with everything.

The ceiling is what perfect is. If what you are working on has no constraint, if you have all the resources in the world to do it perfectly, what would it look like? That answer is your ceiling.

The floor is the minimum acceptable action; it is as close to good enough as you can get. It is the version that meets the spec you set. It’s not perfect. Never will be.

If nothing gets done, ensure it reaches the floor. The higher it goes above it, the better.

You aren’t required to always go for the ceiling. The least you can do is check the floor. And maybe raise it too.

Their job is to be entertained by your art. To be moved by it. To critique it. To praise and badmouth it. To compare it with others.

Remember this when you find yourself doing their job.

Before you decide to share that story with others, start by telling it to yourself. Your story matters. It always has. Telling your stories to yourself helps you see yourself, and see the plots clearer. It helps you understand facts, fiction, reality and what meaning you decide to give each.

I’ve written before about how the stories we tell ourselves matter. The ones we believe about ourselves. Those stories influence how we relate with the world. Before that, they influence how we relate within ourselves.

Stories help us talk to ourselves. When we stop telling ourselves stories, we forget. Those stories die. Or worse, a narrow version flourishes because you refuse to tell yourself the other versions, over and again.

All stories are invented. We can as well invent stories that help us heal. Stories that lighten up our hearts. Stories that help us become who we want to become.

Two people may listen to the same story and interpret it differently. When the story is yours, you decide how you want to interpret it for yourself. And what you want that story to do with and for you.

Stories are after-the-fact. The same way you can tell yourself stories to understand yourself and the world, you can also tell yourself stories to misunderstand the world.

Storytelling is personal and communal. Most people ignore the personal in chase of the communal. Don’t be most people.

You are the most important audience for your story. Just by being alive, you are already telling the most important story you may ever tell - the story of your life. You may as well do it deliberately, and keenly listen.

Afterwards, you can decide which to share with others, and with whom to share.

We all are.

None of us is grown up. And none of us is dead - at least not while reading this. Of the two states, the latter is what I’m sure about.

We are all growing, if we choose to. And we are all dying daily, whether we choose to or not.

That’s good news. Now we can forget about becoming grown ups and focus on the verb - the growing.

We can change our relationship with death and focus on the renewal that dying daily brings.

Life is too precious to leave one for the other.

For many, the answer is yes. They’ve seen a picture somewhere and everywhere. In a church nearby. On the internet. In stories and videos. In many renditions made during Easter and Christmas.

None of the images you’ve seen of Jesus is right. When compared to one another, none of them is wrong.

What has travelled over the centuries are vivid imaginations of what various people in each generation believed Jesus looked like.

None of them could truly tell how tall he was, or how fair. None of them is certain about the colour of his eyes, the thickness of his eyelids or the size and depth of his philtrum.

None of them truly knew if he had a mustache, and what his cheekbone look like. None of them can truly tell us about the size of his teeth, what his smile looked like or what the tone of his voice sounded like.

Those who have a spiritual relationship can infer from the voice they’ve heard. None of the voices in all videos reenacted and none of the portraits in all the billions of pictures ever created is truly of the Jesus who walked on earth.

Imagine that the first time you had an experience, it gets written in an online document. Everything you felt was recorded. Then the document expands to include every decision you make, and the blocks of beliefs and assumptions those decisions are built on.

Imagine those blocks were used to make a platform. And you have to walk on that platform. Speak from that platform. Live on that platform. And for some reasons, no one goes back to check if those blocks are credible enough to carry your weight the way it did in the past.

Maybe we need not imagine it. Why imagine when we live it out daily.

Worldviews are living documents. They will always be edited, added to, and removed from. They will be altered constantly. They are meant to.

I get better as I keep reconsidering my perception of reality and altering my stand based on fresh insights. Fresh insights doesn’t have to mean new insights; it might be an old wisdom looked at in a way I hadn’t before.

The more certain I am that how I see reality is the most correct, the more likely there is an untested assumption or folly lurking somewhere close.

And the more I effect these tiny changes, the more different I become. I love to change my opinions about things all the time. I like to review old decisions and check the assumptions that led to them. I try to get as close as I can to what’s useful and real.

This is a good thing, but not for everyone. Living this way may be more challenging for the people around you than it is for you.

Does this story feel familiar?

People get close to you and fall in love with a version of you they know now. As your worldview changes, some of those people try to hold on to the version of you they met. And they start grieving the loss of that version. Grief shows up in many ways. From criticising the new, to insisting on the old.

Just as no one steps into the same stream twice, we are never the same person when we keep editing how we see the world.

How we see the world influences what we do in the world. It influences the problems we choose to solve, the people we choose to love, and how we live. The least we can do is to pay attention to the little script running under the hood.

Maybe, the world becomes better from this simple life-long activity. At least, our worlds will.

For each of those situations, doing what was pre-determined and universally accepted can be considered right. Deviating from that may be considered wrong.

If I ask you for the first few numbers of Pie, all you have to do is vomit what the scientific community had pre-determined.

Same for the speed of light or how many terms the president of your country can stand for re-election.

How about how to show respect for someone older?

Anyone who doesn’t belong to or acknowledge the group we reference can decide not to honour that pre-determined answer and find their own answers.

It was once considered right that the earth was flat. It still is within some groups. People have been shamed and punished for saying the earth rotated round the sun. And many have lost their lives or livelihood to saying things that weren’t aligned with what’s popular.

Often, right and wrong is a result of a group’s taste.

Have you heard people debate what tools is right for a job, casting disdain and shame on anyone who dares a different path? Think programmers and programming languages. Designers and software tools. Lawyers and legal templates. Accountants and accounting practices. Writers and book layouts. Educators and teaching styles. Researchers and citation techniques.

The only time you can get away with driving on the left side of the road is when you drive in places where the group had pre-determined this.

Most laws, rules and rituals are results of the taste of the average member of that group.

Even this sentence is uncorrect because English speakers had pre-decided that we prefer ‘incorrect’ to ‘uncorrect,’ and ‘uncorrectable’ to ‘incorrectable.’

Right and wrong is often about what the group you choose to belong has pre-determined as the answer to each specific situation. Even if it’s a group of 1.

A group favours a way of doing something and makes it a convention. You see that convention and call it best practice.

No best practice is right or wrong. Just group think and taste at work.

I had a few of those. There are some I re-read every few years. I read one and it didn’t do what it used to do. It was, underwhelming, to say the least.

Did I outgrow the book? Had the same happened to you too?

Maybe it wasn’t the books. Maybe it was the time you read them. Pick that book up today, and chances are it may not have the same effect it once had on you. Like the line in one book that used to be ‘boring’ and has now become one of my favourites.

Same books. Different resonance.

So what’s the right answer to the question we opened with? There are no right and wrong answers.

Just moments in time. Each book was best for that particular phase.

Right now, I’m not interested in ‘saving the world’. We can still influence the world, change the world, make the world better. But not by trying to saving the world with our might.

Our job is not to save the world. It’s not to save anyone.

It’s to enable people to do their best work and save themselves. It’s to support others so they can stand up for themselves. So they can choose what problem they want to help solve. So they can do the work the quest they’ve chosen requires.

We can create environments that enable those quests. We can hunt for resources to make those quests possible. But we can’t do those quests for them.

I’ve come to understand that ‘change-making’ isn’t about saving the world. It’s about connecting with others to see the gaps together, so that each of us can choose which gaps we want to fill.

Of course, this is just one lens that may resonate with a different phase of life. If ‘saving the world’ lights you up in ways that make you show up with care and dedication to the work, and if it drives you to create things that benefit others in unprecedented ways, then follow that path.

There is no one way to make our worlds better.

“I feel proud of myself for resisting the urge of sitting through that.”she later told him. “Feels so joyful,” she added.

One joy felt shallow. The other felt deeper.

Until he mentions that the series he saw inspired the white paper he published yesterday and will serve as foundation for his next project.

And she later confessed to spending some of that time just scrolling on her phone.

We all have within reach options that bring shallow joys and deeper joys. None is better than the other. None is more right than the other.

The ultimate test of the joy you enjoy is that it is helping you become the kind of person you said you want to be.

We are both friends to someone who starts the day at 3am, does most things until they step out at 8am and returns home so they can sleep at 6pm. Only to wake up at 2:30am to prep for the day. Like clockwork.

I have another friend who also starts her day at 6am and takes a break by 9:30am. I know not to call her between 10am and noon because she will be sleeping. Then she starts the second part of the day and retires to bed later at night.

When I talked about these my friends recently, someone I barely knew scolded: “how can she be wasting prime time sleeping?”

Made me wonder who defines what time is prime time.

None of their approaches are right and wrong. Just different.

All conclusions are snapshots. No conclusion covers it all.

No picture is the complete picture. Just stories within a frame.

No answer is an absolute answer.

When our choice changes based on what tradeoff we are comfortable with, there is rarely a right or wrong answer.

Life is both simple and complex. Clarity and mystery can live together in the same space.

Ambiguity and clarity work in cycles. One leading to the other.

The more we know, the more we know we don’t know.

The more we mature, the more we realise these over and over again.

A modular expert flamboyantly declared the answer as both 0 and 1.

A class of kindergarten kids chorused ‘4’ as an answer.

The post-doc who once used binary numbers system convinced me the answer is written as 100.

In a way, they were all right. In a way, they were wrong. Or better, there was no right or wrong.

They all gave us a piece of what they understood based on where they were standing, and all they could see.

When a simple question leads to multiple answers, maybe the question and the paths become more valuable than hugging one singular answer.

There is a story from Matthew Syed that might help us answer that question. Matthew once watched the three greatest tennis players of all time play at the same time.

Who wouldn’t love to see Federer, Nadal and Djokovic play?

He described what he saw.

“When Nadal warmed up, it was sheer aggression. He sprinted up and down like a man possessed with his shirt dripping in sweat.

When Djokovic warmed up, it was pure emotionless calibration. He was measured and scientific with every shot.

When Federer warmed up, you could hear him giggling before he arrived. He was doing trick shots, caressing the ball and exploring his own creativity.”

The right and wrong way to play tennis is often dictated by what some people have pre-agreed about the game.

But the best way to play tennis? That’s to play it the way that works for you, based on all you know about yourself and the game.

Maybe that’s the best way to play every other game, including the game of life.

Especially the game of life.

Everything happens in contexts.

What is acceptable in one context may not be when the context changes.

Every society defines what is acceptable and what isn’t. Every action falls on the spectrum between being acceptable and not being acceptable. Throughout human history, the same actions have danced from one end of that spectrum to the other.

Right and wrong are ineffective tools we use in moving around the world. We keep using it because it sometimes gets us close to where we want. It sometimes help us imprint our perspective on others.

Every perspective is incomplete regardless of the truth in it.

We use right and wrong to create pain and judgement. We use both to grow in status and affiliation. We use both, even when it has become a prison.

That something is deemed as ‘right’ doesn’t make it acceptable. Others labelling it ‘wrong’ doesn’t make it not acceptable either.

When we swap right and wrong for acceptable and not acceptable (yet), we may find a better framework.

But when we use it, we can also be mindful to answer: acceptable to whom exactly? Who made this rule, and why?

Less than a century ago, it was not acceptable for women to vote or work outside their homes - until it was. It was acceptable for humans to kill one another as a form of entertainment and sport, until it wasn’t. Even within the same country, what’s acceptable for one family is not for another.

Many of what we consider acceptable today will be laughed at tomorrow.

The least we can do is to define what is acceptable to us, right now. And why it is. We know some of it will change. We expect it to.

And we can stop living the lie of being right and wrong.

Transformation happens when we lean into the wisdom of what’s uncertain, only to come out at the other end better.

Ask a lot of people with this experience if they are grateful for going through the process when things were uncertain. You’ll likely hear resounding yeses. Ask if they’ll want to go through that process again, and you might get surprising answers.

The best way to future-proof isn’t to predict more scenarios, but to tune your mind to address whatever happens. Whatever happens is the plan.

What makes most games interesting is that you get to make decisions when uncertain. Think of all the games you’ve played - from video games, board games and the ones designed by life.

We always have a choice when dealing with uncertainty. We can decide which to live with and which not to. The wisdom is in knowing which kind we’ve been dealt with.

We can plan as much as we can. And we should, based on all we can control. We can’t accurately predict what uncertainty will influence the final outcome.

Neither is it useful fearing or fighting what’s uncertain. We drown in uncertainty when we fear it the most. The answer to what’s uncertain doesn’t have to end with “I don’t really know” or “I might not know”.

It might as well be “I wonder what I have to learn to figure this out. Fun, yeah?”

You might be somewhat set, but there is still a gap in what you are thinking about.

Maybe your body is tired. Or your mind wants to pay attention to something else. Something urgent.

Or there is resistance. Maybe not to writing. But to something else. Something you might uncover as you write.

Or the excitement of what the completed work will look and feel like. And what those who’ll love the piece will say. And what those who dislike the piece will say.

Maybe there is no excitement. No trepidation. Maybe, there is no fuel to dream up the next word.

Maybe you are just blocked. That block is real.

Just that, it is almost about everything else but making and writing the next sentence.

Writer’s block is the story we tell ourselves to pass things on to the muse.

We can stop lying to ourselves about why we aren’t writing. We can own what’s truly holding us back and decide what to do about it.1