It's okay to demand your own right to live deliberately and listen to what truly reaches you. To some degree, we're all flying blind. None of us knows much of anything. And fear does not make the core questions go away. It just hides them, turning the wellspring of any inspiration and wonder they might have carried into a stagnant pool of cynicism and disillusionment. A persistent thread of doubt is worth pulling on. It might just lead us somewhere better. Or it might even lead us back with a new perspective that makes everything we've known real and meaningful for the first time. But it starts with saying "no" to the fear, and everything else that manipulates and reduces us.