longing becomes not the craving for perfection – for the shimmer of glory, for the myth of closure, for the happily ever after – but a kind of tenderness for imperfection, for the recognition that the place between no more and not yet is the place where the chance-miracle of life lives itself through us, and that is a beautiful place*
Maria Popova

Two things: everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there are, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of a life a reality in his or her own being.**
Viktor Frankl

Robert McKee reflects on writing but
provides us with a question for our lives:
Here’s a simple test to apply to any story: What is the risk?^
It is what draws us forward,
Holding us in the right direction,
Sustaining us through fat and lean,
Pulling us into action,
However small those steps may be.
Susan Cain names it “bittersweet”:
Longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it.*
This kind of risk –
A risk for something rather than anything –
Will lead us through
dark and light, through pain and
delight, through the shortness
of our days and the endlessness of meaning, and, yet,
Still we must.

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: The Power of the Bittersweet: Susan Cain on Longing as the Fulcrum of Creativity;
**Viktor Frankl’s Yes to Life;
^Robert McKee‘s newsletter: How Risk Makes a Meaningful Story.