“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own–not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.”

“So other people hurt me? That’s their problem. Their character and actions are not mine. What is done to me is ordained by nature and what I do by my own.”

“Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”

You'd think these are the words of a Buddhist monk but all the above were written by Marcus Aurelius, emperor of the Roman Empire i.e. Barack Obama of his time. What's interesting is the man's ability to notice, analyze and reflect on his feelings. That same attention to the small and imperceptible echoes Anna Quindlen's advice from her "Short Guide to a Happy Life" :

"Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes"

A valuable reminder of Burning man's statement not to live "the Default life" you've been handed and a beautiful echo to the fact "This Life is not a drill" - The action won't come later. This is actually happening. Have an impossible morning :)