Journey of Self-Improvement: Reflections on Personal Growth and Human History

I've been able to take care of some of my bad habits for almost three days now. They feel like an eternity. My muscles ache, and I realize that I'll have to factor in exercise a few days later. The key habits that I would like to keep up and sharpen are writing and reading. Being able to talk about my misgivings has helped a lot. Currently, I'm reading Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. Some concepts resonate well with me; some I take with a grain of salt. The reading is exciting, and the writing seems well-informed. My thoughts now wander back hundreds of thousands of years, and I try to imagine what a human eons ago must have felt. What were the troubles that they dealt with? What were the aims that they aspired to? And finally, how did this age come about? This age that so many find wonderful to live in, this best of times which incidentally many feel to be the worst of times as well (current famine-like conditions and warzones around the world). A single individual's relation to this whole universe has always been insignificant in terms of the sheer billions of experiences that happen at this very moment for everyone and everything. So there isn't much an individual can do to change the state that we as a whole universe are in. That can be taken as a means to despair, but just because we cannot know everything, be everywhere, or every-while doesn't make our life less livable. This brief moment of life that we have can be experienced to its fullest, and I mean to say fullest in the most vague way possible, as I cannot fathom and report here a single universal rule to which one can adhere in order to live a complete life. There are billions upon billions of variations for what we can call life. But among those variations, we get to make choices—some of our own accord, some made by the context we're in—and that dance between knowns and unknowns is where life occurs to me. And I choose to listen to the music that this dance demands. Like the highs and lows that make a musical piece, I am at a period where I have to deal with my lows, the darker side of my being. By this, I mean to control the things that are truly under my command: my thoughts, my reactions, my conduct. Making these amends is a lifelong process which I gladly undertake.