Choose your sacrifices

Be willing to sacrifice 

 
You can choose which sacrifices you make, or you can let life choose for you, push you around. If you want gains with no loss, that is impossible. Then life will decide for you.

As you try to hold on to every nice thing in your life, this or that will be taken from you, like a goalie tending many open nets. How easy it is to score a goal on an unguarded net while its tender is away trying to keep all of the nets safe.

journal entry with light revision.

Want one thing, and accept the sacrifice that comes with it

Better is to hold onto one net, give up the rest so you can defend it. Pick a good net, one that you have enough reach to manage, yet enough room to spread yourself across. Pick the one that matters most to you. Let others tend over the remaining open nets.

If you don't pick one net, the best will be taken from you one by one, as you try to hold onto all of them. They will be lost to you if you try to keep them anyways. If you don't make a choice, you will be left with the one that no one else wanted to take from you. You will be forced to accept sacrifices of the best choices that you yourself were unwilling to make, wishing to have everything nice.

Don't hold on to trains moving in opposite directions

You are holding onto the reins of horses scattering to the four directions, until one by one your grip is broken and you are left holding onto the weakest horse, all your beautiful stallions galloped away with resolute riders. You will see the ones you wanted most ride away, because you would not choose between them.

In an eclipse, you have all good things at once by a rare alignment of timing and circumstance. To keep all of it, you think to stand in one place where the stars align and stupidly hope the heavens stay aligned forever. You think doing nothing but enjoying the view will keep all the bright points in perfect alignment.

This is not a valley, where good things collect at a single point. It is a crossing of trajectories in a momentary meeting shared by bodies on different journeys. They will all depart from you, standing still on that singular intersection where they meet. Your choice is not all of them to have; it is which trajectory you are willing to sacrifice the others for. You gift is first pick, not all of them.

To want everything is to want none of the work

You wouldn't want what I have if you knew
what I had to go through to get it.

The only place you get everything is the lowest point in a valley, where all the shit tends at the bottom.