It’s important to keep on practicing even when we don’t want to. Yes, it’s important to behave toward others with grace and dignity. But the most important aspect of discipline is humility. We may have learned a great deal over the course of the years, but we have to resist the temptation of becoming proud of what we’ve learned. There’s so much we don’t know, and so many opportunities to learn more about ourselves and others, and about the relationship between absolute and relative reality and the relationship between emptiness and appearance, the causes and conditions that are the basis of our temporal, or relative, experience.

When we maintain our motivation we often find, to our surprise, that we have more energy than we thought; that the hardships or obstacles we face aren’t as intense, scary, or prohibitive as they initially appeared. We begin to experience a subtle and inspiriting joy in stepping farther away from our comfort zones.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.