Don't Worry, You'll be Fine

Connecting the dots looking forward

I love biographies. They have the power to make me feel like everything is going to be okay and that the things stressing me out right now will, one day, be insignificant. Biographies are proof that you can live, learn, and die, and your glory — big or small — can be preserved untainted by minor setbacks such as parking tickets and romantic rejections. (You think Napoleon Bonaparte never had to deal with post-dinner bloating?) When you observe a human life from a far enough distance, all the trials and tribulations just become rounding errors.

Dostoyevsky said that to love someone means to see them as God intended, so why on earth shouldn’t you also be a ‘someone’? This makes me think that sometimes you have to try to look at yourself through the eyes of God: how tiny and lacking, yet how precious and important; how flawed and powerless, yet unique and loved. To see like God is to see all of time compressed into one tiny book called history, brushing past yourself as just one punctuati…