Jarvis Cline
Main Page	Life	Impressions	Advice
My advice to the child:     Enjoy it. Do everything you can; learn everything you can. Analyze everything, and yourself especially. There's no excuse to ever be bored, you have a million things you can do and an infinite number to think about; but if you ever are bored, then relish it -- nothing says that you have all the time in the world quite like boredom. Discipline yourself. Set your goals and your standards, you can keep them for life. Use your imagination. Your mind is an amazing tool and you can train it however you like right now. Figure out for yourself what's important; you're the only one who can. Your conscience knows what's right or wrong, listen to it always. Do everything that makes you feel good about yourself. Be strong. Stand up for yourself. Always be yourself. Life is the most amazing thing you'll ever know, and you can love it always. My advice to the adolescent:     Life sucks. There's no meaning in anything, just an endless uselessness; a tiring void to dwindle away your short life. But that's alright, your life doesn't matter. You're already dead. Everything you feel is just the result of the chemical stew in your skull -- your feelings are nothing at all. Why are your values -- whichever ones you happen to have ingrained -- really worth anything? If you've ever felt love, it was only because your genes made you vulnerable to it: love is an evolutionary rein to try to get you to have a family, to raise children so that the senselessness can perpetuate. You don't even feel conscious; there aren't any choices in life, not really, and you just sit by and watch and react to whatever your mind and environment throw at you in the only way you can. Why would you care -- about anything? Why would you even try?     --- Sound familiar? If you've let nihilism strike you in the soul then it may well haunt you forever, and certainly nothing you hear right now will have any much effect; but know that you'll probably come to some peace with yourself. Whatever you conceive in your mind, life truly is pervaded with feelings of meaningfulness. If you want to obsess about a concept, let it be amazement; contemplate the sheer wonder of it all. If you ponder your own being, how can you not be struck by how fascinating you are? -- how miraculously complex and beautiful? And through the baffling midst of reality, do you not sense that at the root of it, everything is so strikingly clear and simple? If you're lost, then the greatest advice I can offer you -- just do it -- is to close your eyes, take a breath, relax your muscles, allow your mind to clear itself of everything, and just for a moment, let yourself feel. Feel whatever comes to surface. You might quiver, you might tear up -- you might just fall gently asleep -- or you might feel nothing, and at the end this may do nothing at all; but it does for me, and I know that a suppressed spirit -- maybe you've been slowly killing it -- will surge up in such a moment and reaffirm you. ...You never know what's within your grasp until you reach for it. My advice to the adult:     Feel free to listen to my advise for the child or adolescent. ;) My advice to everyone (and exceedingly the most important)...     Go vegan.