Work hard. Aim for the stars. Be the absolute best that you can be. Others will tell you: Be practical. Baby steps. Keep your feet hugging the ground. Your head clear. That is the way to be.
Go with the flow.
No!
Make your own destiny.
Cultivate peace inside.
No! get angry. Stomp your feet. Don’t be silent facing tyranny. There are ten easy rules that lead to happiness. When you fail, it’s because you weren’t following them most ardently. Think positive thoughts. Better yet, don’t think at all. Let the stale carrot laying in the fridge be your ultimate role model. I wish I could be what I loath to eat. I will be a cucumber. You be lettuce. And together we will get tossed into a grand salad. Heaven on earth. Tomorrow when we rot in the garbage bin it won’t seem so fantastic. Eat more protein and less gluten. Or is it the other way around?
Every expert who prescribes to you a way of being is handing you a pair of shackles. Who has truth squished between his fingers? How can you bite off your own piece? Life is complicated. The streams of luck, providence and circumstance come together and fall apart in mystery. Nobody knows anything. Least of which are the experts. Ignorance is bliss. They don’t even acknowledge the depth of their ignorance. I am here to tell you. I know nothing. You should suspect every utterance. Even the things I think I know, I might change my mind about at a later point.
This is why I love stories. Stories allow us to approach the truth without pretense. An author doesn’t have to get her act together before she sits down to write. An author doesn’t even pretend she has figured it out. A novel reflects life without editing out the maddening complexity. The unfathomable business of being a human on this planet. I imagine that god has crumbled truth into infinite crumbs sprinkled it across creation. Each one of us got a tiny incomplete morsel. The only way to expand your truth allotment is to become curios about the truth as other people see it. Preferably from a completely different perspective than yours. A collective process of placing the jigsaw puzzle together.

Ignorance is bliss my friend. Acknowledging your own brings all of us closer to the truth.

I turned Ignorance Is Bliss essay into a video titled: The tree of ignorance is beautiful