My Next Breath: A Memoir

by Jeremy Renner

THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU. The thought comes to me whole, unfiltered, pure. This is the first of the cheat codes this incident creates for me. THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU.

We are all eternally connected, bound by love and the purest parts of our being, bound by shared history and our innate, unyielding, unchanging energy.

To make things better, to achieve the things you want to achieve, to push through and past obstacles, you have to do something. You cannot be inactive. You will die. Complacency is death; it is the opposite of life; it is what keeps us stuck in situations that make us unhappy.

Love slowly, quietly, and patiently waits for hate to simply burn out. It requires so much more energy to hate than to love, and love has all the time in the world.

The only way love wins is across a span of time—it’s not an instant fix to anything, but it always wins.

hate won’t outlive anyone—only love can do that.

There is so much nonsense going on in the world right now, tremendous amounts of damaging white noise. We are all sucked into it, through those little computers we carry around with us in our pockets, machines whose algorithms force us to bear silent witness to catastrophes all around the globe constantly, even when there’s nothing we can do about them except be drawn down into a caldera of depression and inertia. But when faced with the tumult of incidents—the wars and betrayals, the losses and disasters, amplified as they are by the inanity of social media, and underpinned by the need for everyone everywhere to be speaking at all times

Love: That’s what lasts. That’s what wins. Always.

I have the blessings of knowing what a bad day really is, and I’ll never get to have another one ever again”—was