We have all gotten lost, whether literally on a physical journey or in life, in confusion and chaos. It is when the unrecognizable faces us that we feel out of place—a strange neighborhood, an unfamiliar situation, a party where you know no one, heartbreak that is inconceivable. Where or to what do you turn to when facing these scenarios? What is the result? Or does the overwhelming catastrophe of it all consume you until someone bails you out? Or do you run away?

This all relates to the mechanism of coping—how well we deal with challenges, responsibilities, and situations of stress. Why do some people cope better than others? Why does one person lose his or her leg and can still live a full and happy life while another person that loses his or her leg falls into a depressing, stagnant life. Is the way we cope learned? Gained through experience? Genetic?

This topic has come up in my mind because I am facing my own challenges at the present time. The only answer I have to these questions is spiritual, but even within this realm of thought there is a hierarchy of the ability of coping. Therefore, I really don’t have the answers to the above questions.

The Wikipedia article on coping states that there are three main coping strategies: appraisal-focused, problem-focused, and emotion-focused coping. Appraisal-focused coping occurs when a person modifies the way he or she thinks about a problem. Problem-focused coping occurs when the cause of the problem is dealt with. Emotion-focused coping occurs when a person releases buried emotions, or uses meditation or other procedures of relaxation.

I can’t say that the methods I use even fit within those categories. And these strategies still don’t explain the degree of success one person will have versus another—why does one person cope better than another even with the same strategy?

Well, I think that’s enough to get the mind working. Try and observe the people around you and see how they cope. Also, pay close attention to how you cope. Perhaps you’ll learn something with regards to how to live a better life, because that is a given: the better we cope, the better our lives will be.

Conquering is in our blood. We must have. We must own. We must take. A child desires a toy, a teenager longs for a car, a man lusts for money, power, and women, and a woman lusts for the shiny wonders of our world. There is always something—at any given moment—that we long for. There is always one more thing.

When is enough, enough? When can we finally say that we are fully satisfied and not one more item or cent will make us feel one ounce more fulfilled? We never can and it is never enough, and this is why: there is no such thing as permanent ownership. Therefore, when I say enough is never enough, I mean that it is impossible to have enough because no matter how much we have—how much we have “conquered”—we have or will lose it: every penny, every article, every inch. This is no myth or hypothetical gesture of thought; this is reality. Death escapes no one.

I caution everyone’s agendas in life. What matters? What is meaning? I deny that meaning is garnered by the size of your wallet or the immensity of your home. While such materials are beneficial and objects of temporary happiness, I believe that our journeys here on this ever-so-slowly dying world are our candidacies for a potential election into roles of a different kind of power (not the power to change the world or the power to own a piece of it): the power of joy, which is far removed from the ideals of happiness. Joy can be happy, but it can also be sorrowful. It can be empathetic and encouraging, and it can be giving and selfless. The right question to ask yourself—if you are serious about this path of life you walk—is: Do you have joy? Joy cannot be found in possessions and it cannot be earned. If you have joy, then I believe you are making the most of your time—for the focus of your life is not on things, but on life itself.

Your statement to me at this point may be: If what you say is true, then under such an argument nothing really matters, since we lose it all in the end. On the contrary, everything matters: choices, relationships, actions. Making a mark matters, but not making one of ephemeral material. Make your mark in joy. It influences, its sets an example, it leads, and it brings about peace.

Until we stop conquering, the world—our lives and the lives of those after us—will never be safe.

There are times when you don’t have a presence in this world. These times are when you close your eyes, dust off your mind, and transcend consciousness into the oblivion of dream. You become a puppet to unknown hands. Sometimes you are thrown into a pit of horror where devils of uncouth ways create a world more sinister than any known situation of your waking hours. Sometimes you are not even a first-person entity and are but an apparitional spectator looking in on a moment assembled for someone else. Dreaming,

in a very forthright and often disregarded designation, with its non-present consciousness, is a demonstration of chance. But how can chance—the same chance applied to rolling the dice or buying a Lotto ticket—be applied to the self, when the mind and its inner workings are indisputably separate from any other sciences and natures of the world and universe that would have a cause and effect? How can chance writhe, convulse, and vomit in your own head, independently?

Your dreams are you, but they aren’t. You didn’t think of them consciously, which really means you didn’t think of them at all. But your brain, as it exists as a machine apart from your consciousness, still functions, and with its functioning apart from your consciousness, it reveals a second existence lingering within you—a second self, a raw, uninhibited second self that pays no heed to right or wrong, good or evil, ethics or immorality; it gives into passion, it gives into lust, it gives into abysmal, terrible, carnal actions that make you say it can’t be you. I agree with you. It’s not you; it’s your second self. Either that or it’s something else that joins you while you sleep and dances in your mind.

Sleep deeply.

Who are we? Who are you? I’m not talking about your name, or your ethnicity, or your religion; I’m talking about the consciousness that you so ignorantly control and use to inhabit your mind and move your body. By what power were you placed into the country you were raised in, with the family who raised you, and in the order you were delivered (if you have siblings)? Your consciousness could have been born into billions of possibilities, yet it came to be where you are now.

What I write of goes beyond all of the operating pieces of your body—beyond the genetics in your blood and beyond the neurons in your brain. All of these pieces are what they are—a fully functional human being—but they don’t make you. Even the personality you contain is like the theme on a computer—an appearance limited and influenced by components and by history; it still doesn’t give you the authorization over what you now control and the life you now live.

I bring this matter up to elicit curiosity, and a curiosity further reaching than the dismal trap of either cherishing or not cherishing the origins you come from. I am asking you to delve deeper. Genuinely think about the essence that is you. The real you is hidden in the domains of interpretation that only come with active pursuit. Ponder it: Is it arbitrary? Is it luck? Is it fate? Is it placement by a higher power? I am asking the questions, but you have to come up with your own answers. The answers aren’t concrete or comprehensibly absolute, but they are worth scrutinizing with your piercing intellect, and more, your heart beyond hearts.

Lastly, do not place all of the focus on the how, although it is important and the core of my philosophical jab; also place focus on the control of the you you are—the choices you make and the future you prepare.

Evil is imagination. Isn’t it? It starts with a subtle spark in the mind as a wayward, sadistic vision—something conjured from the pit of the artistic self: a cunning verbal assault, sleek revenge, picturesque destruction. It then, with further provocation, evolves into an inferno of unstoppable action—action that cannot be ignored, hindered, or forced away. Bam! A blinding moment hits that blurs intelligence, common sense, and any acknowledgment of the powers of good (or it simply mocks the idea of good for the sake of twisted justice). Evil—what was first only a fabrication of the mind—pours into reality.

It may be an instantaneous reaction or a well-thought out plan, but it is what it is: evil. And it is an inventive choice. No one raises a child to hit when angry; it’s the child’s own secret wish, boiled to the surface by consequence. The extremes of adult behavior within this category need not be marked amongst these words, but these actions, too, are casualties of imagination gone wrong, gone real.

There is a strange death in following through with the decisions of wickedness. We lose pieces of ourselves to things lingering beneath the surfaces that are not ourselves. Then those pieces that we lose grow on their own and erode elsewhere: a crack that becomes a canyon. And we all say I could never do that. But you can! We all can. It is potential versus actual. The thoughts—the imagination of it all—cross all of our minds, but do we all act?—no. Only the weak. And I say weak because to act means to lose self-control.

I encourage everyone to be patient and to give resolution a chance. There is a monster in all of us, but it is a monster that can easily be subdued. Pursue your dreams, however dark they may be, but only as fictitious landscapes. Let not those demons of chaos trickle through the gateways of our minds to the actions of our hands.