Occam's Razor

I was caught off-guard by the frost, and the deep breath-in burned my lungs. Summer's reprise brings hubris and you forget how the winter-cold sneaks under collars and finds its way down the spine, chills you to your bones. You forget how much you have to fight. And how tiring it gets, how it wears you down to a little nub. But how you cling to it, try to find strength in it, resolve to not be fooled by summer again.

She sat at her desk and I in a chair next to her. "The most important thing," she said, "is the approval that you give to yourself. And strength is in cleaving yourself from those who put that asunder." It was so simple and yet it had never occurred to me prior to her saying it. An axiom that is at once sad and liberating. There are behaviors that can only lead to pain and suffering, and any medical doctor would tell you in your misery simply to stop the behaviors. And it would be obvious, and you would stop them. There are relationships also that only lead to pain and suffering and you can look at everything stretched out over time and see that there is always only one outcome. And how foolish it seems to think there will every be anything different. Life is the thing that changes, not people. And how you have to protect yourself.