Laundry List Item 10: The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there's no compensation for misfortune.

I lived the first 36 years of my life thinking about all the things I regretted and missed out on. Actually, that is not true. For the first 16 or so years, I was living in the moment, on a high. I loved life, my school, my friends, the sports I played. I was excelling.

Something happened over the latter half of my teenaged years. I am not so sure that it was what happened that was the problem, but rather my ability to handle it. I was not capable of that age of tapping into my own internal thoughts and feelings, and trusting that I knew what was best for me. I thought I had to tap into God's plan for my life, and that if I didn't follow it right, then I was going to miss out.

And for the next 20 years that is what I believed, that I had made a series of poor choices and that was why I had not excelled as much as I believed I deserved to. I was depressed, living the life I thought I should live, living within what I knew I was capable of.

It took a crisis to start to understand that the world does not always follow the rules of rewarding me for following the rule book created by others, and compensating me for the shitty things I have experienced. Things happen, and I have a choice about how to respond. There is no plan to follow. There is a lived experience every moment, I get to choose my path based on what happens in each moment, and my presence and wisdom about what to do next.

I am grateful for all the things that have happened in my first 37 years of living. I am grateful for bringing me to this moment of surrender and understanding. The world does not owe me anything. I am here. I get to exist and experience two billion moments. I want to squarely look at and experience each one of them.