Michael

“Still, there were questions that would not go away. None of the usual solutions to life that were on offer meant much to me and, like many young people, I didn’t at first expect to live for a long time. When I continued living anyway and needed to make a life, I found myself yearning to make sense of things. I had noticed, as almost everyone does, moments of great and apparently everlasting beauty followed by standard-issue miseries and found the incongruence hard to deal with. I wanted to be loyal to that beauty while not dodging the dark bits.”
― John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life