The famed novelist Leo Tolstoy says that what really propels people to change, more than our mental resolution (I need to change) is a firm conviction that our lives can’t go on as they have before (I must change or I will die). And yet this man who wrote so beautifully about the development of his characters and the possibility of change came face to face in his own life with a soul-wrenching collision, one in which the determined optimism of “I can change” collided with, and finally yielded to, the defeated resignation of his inability to do so. Tolstoy, remembered today as one of the
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