My own nature hovers between neurotic and paranoid. I've developed the habit of mentally listing things that make me optimistic about the future. I do it every day.

• We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.
• Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.
• No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life's slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.
• Allowing children to show their guilt, show their grief, show their anger, takes the sting out of the situation.
• Anger elicits anger, fear elicits fear, no matter how well meaning we may be.
• Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.
• Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.
• Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.
• Bracketing has turned all my experiences, remembered and present, into a gallery of miracles where I wander around dazzled by the beauty of events I cannot explain.
• In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it.