This Is Water

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

is unimaginably hard to do this — to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out.