Make and keep friends. Tell loved ones how you feel. Forgive and seek forgiveness. Feel deeply. Observe miracles. Make them happen.

Eventually he concluded that even in the worst pain, humans can choose to infuse meaning into their experiences, saying, “what is to give light must endure burning.”

In the grip of depression or anxiety, any affirmative step is better than paralysis. Action promotes more action; decision produces decision; living generates life.

Harry Truman, said: “Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.”

Perfectionism, by contrast, can become an enemy of life itself, freezing us in place while the world goes on without us.

“Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own,” he wrote in his Meditations. In another gem, he observed that “it never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”

He had an understanding that mistakes can have virtue. They show that we are making the effort, engaging with life, “in the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt famously put it.

The past has slipped beyond our influence and the future is outside our knowing. To be happy and fruitful, we must engage with right now.

“When you don’t have an income, you create. You find a job.”