Everything That Meets You

Turning eighteen deserves more than a card. It deserves honesty—that the years ahead are going to be harder than anyone tells you, and also stranger and better than you expect. Don’t grind yourself down over what you haven’t managed yet. What you’ve already done is real and worth something.

Dōgen Eihei, a Zen teacher who lived eight hundred years ago, said something I find myself coming back to: Everything is your life. Day and night, whatever meets you is your life; therefore you should adapt your life to the situation that meets you at this moment. Use your vitality to make those circumstances that come to you into a unity with your life and to set things in their right place. It’s not advice to be passive. It’s advice to stop fighting the shape of things and start working with it.

The sky will cloud over. It always does. But there are people who think about you even in the dark—I’m one of them. All my love, Marcel.