Love of Wisdom

To save you the trouble of watching the really-not-so-great-in-terms-of-quality youtube video, I'll just quote Will Smith's 2005 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award speech here:

"The key to life is running and reading....When... you’re out there and you’re running, there’s a little person that talks to you and that little person says, “Oh, I’m tired, my lung’s about to pop, oh, I’m so hurt, I’m so tired, there’s no way I could possibly continue,” and you wanna quit. ...If you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running, you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life.

...The reason that reading is so important: there have been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There’s no new problem you could have (with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything), there’s no problem you could have that someone hasn’t already solved and wrote about... in a book.”

I have a distinct fondness for this philosophy. It is simple and reliable advice, that boils down to four rules to live by. 

1) Exercise. You have a body. Use it.

2) Practice discipline. Don't stop because something is difficult. (Though, this article is a noteworthy amendment here.)

3) Learn. And keep learning. As humans progress, knowledge changes. Do your best to keep up.

4) You never have to be alone. Humanity is a community some two-hundred-thousand (or 3.2 million) years in the making. There are (according to current data) at least 7 billion other people in the world right now. There is or has been someone in the world that feels what you feel, believes what you believe, and loves what you love. At that's promising.

The best part is that our human community is closer and tighter-knit than it's ever been. New ways to use our bodies are being invented with an almost alarming frequency. Plus: the internet. We can be alive and we can be together and we can be alive. And we can be alive.