The Philosophy of Everything

"...it is enough to make good use of what the moment brings." -Marcus Aurelius

Here we are with yet another charged word—fulfillment. It’s that delicate balance of peace and progress, of meaningfulness and mission that we so often find ourselves banging our heads against the wall to strike. It's the thing that, in theory, we intend our every decision to get us closer to. And perhaps that's where we have it wrong—treating fulfillment as a destination, versus a day-to-day state we experience through our actions.

When we think of the word "fulfillment," we tend to immediately picture the abstract, idyllic versions of ourselves and lives that we've yet to realize. Inherently present in the matter of fulfillment is a reflexive tendency to believe that we don't have it yet. What we're missing in this fulfillment-as-a-destination mindset is that fulfillment, in it's truest sense, is the active realization of our compulsions.

"I have the power to act under reservation and turn circumstances to my own advantage." -Marcus Aurelius

It’s the start of a new year—a time when energy and ambitions are at their most palpable. It’s the time when we magically have the fuel to catalyze the reinventions we spent the second half of last year fantasizing about. Even more interesting is the mass perception of the new year as being cause for reinvention (though neither here nor there). I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you have a resolution, it’s one you should’ve made yesterday, or last week, or last month, or the second the desire was conceived. Any goal attached to the turn of a new year is as fickle as time itself. But we’re not here to minimize something as well-intentioned as goal-setting. We’re here to talk about a resolution so essential that without it, true flourishing is impossible.