If all great things are done by a series of small things put together, then great lives are created by a series of small moments put together, most of which we miss out on because we’re writing the synopsis rather than the paragraphs of the chapters.

It’s as though we live to write our eulogies. We get degrees and desire storylines and unfolding fates that make sense and flow well and ultimately to write beautiful and admirable stories, but only ones that we will ever tell ourselves. We’re never actually remembered for more than who we were and who we loved and how we lived in a moment-to-moment sense. The rest — the big, overarching, milestone-kind-of-things don’t matter, and maybe they never did.

We miss the moments because we’re distracted. Distracted by the one person we search for in a crowd, fearing they’re there, even when they’re hours and states and other impossibilities away. By the someone who is always on our minds when we’re writing or creating or choosing or riding the train or falling asleep — and we behave as though they are with us, and narrate our lives by what they’d say and feel and think if they were with us, though we know we’d never know that.

There’s always one daunting task, always one to-do list that fails to include anything surrounding what we actually want to do. Not for work, not for the attention, not out of responsibility, but just because we want to be happy. Always one more step, one more move, one more great love to find before we can be happy.

But we aren’t. We don’t choose. We don’t think we deserve it. We keep searching, and we keep narrating, and we keep living as though we have a tomorrow to live out all these grand fantasies and promises to ourselves when the reality is that unless we stop today we’ll live forever on the promise of tomorrow. These are daydreams. They’re visions and hopes and issues that don’t exist. The minute you start thinking of the past or future realize that it’s only a thought of a thing, a thought that’s happening in a now. A now that we’re missing.

Tomorrow never changes us. Our moves never change us. Our relationships don’t, either. Our problems change as the things in our lives do. The issues we take are reflections of what’s wrong with us, the people we hate reflections of our insecurities. No matter how many things come and go, we take the same issues, and hate the same people for the same reasons, and never stop to realize that it’s not them that we hate, it’s the parts of us they force us to recognize.

You have to stop living for how other people will remember you. Stop living by telling yourself the story that you think other people will be happy reading. Because it’s an empty and lifeless one, and it robs you of the thing you’re most seeking when you do it. The most important thing is that you do what makes you happy — and that you understand that your happiness is your choice, and your responsibility alone. It is not a day or a job or a relationship or a change away, it’s right now. The only work to do is to remove the blocks that prevent you from living it out. The only change that has to happen is to you.

The untold millions of little moments are what matter. It’s not about having a job, it’s about having a life that you want to live. It’s not about having a degree, it’s about the nights you finally felt the opposite of loneliness. It’s not about having a relationship, it’s about being in one, and it’s not about living a life that other people can sum up comfortably, it’s about having a life wherein those millions of moments build and corroborate with one another — and you follow them — and have more. You won’t be there to hear the stories and eulogies they tell of you — you’re only here to know them now.

There’s a difference between what something is and what we think it is. Rather, there’s a difference between the idea that anything is and the awareness that everything is illusory. It sounds abstract and impractical, but it’s a truth that runs steady through the things that seem to matter most to us: we don’t get over someone just because they’re gone, we get over them when we get over the illusion that we still have to grieve. We don’t wake up one day and start loving ourselves, we start realizing that the reasons we didn’t were false beliefs illogically held. We compare ourselves to others to craft these ideas, we narrate our lives through the minds of others because the illusion of their perception, when we create it in our minds, is one we can control. Imaginary things are easier to see because they don’t need to be in front of us for us to believe in them. They always exist. They’re always there to comfort us and let us live the lives we imagine we want. But that’s the problem: when the illusion isn’t the truth, the two collide eventually. The illusion just limits us. Until the letting go leaves us in the illusion of nothingness. And so we create another one.

The intangible things that are present in our lives are the things we don’t think we can go on without. The illusions we have to live with so we can go on with living.

We eventually realize that all things are myriads of expressions of distorted ideas, and that all things are the simple alignment of the illusions we perceive and how the world reflects them back to us. That happiness always came from getting the things we thought the illusion would like, and that unhappiness was realizing that receiving them filled the void and then we crafted another illusion to replace it. All unlasting, false things are products of this, and the only way to transcend them is to simply be aware. The greatest secret of life is realizing that these things aren’t part of us. They aren’t natural. As easily as we created our illusions we can get rid of them, we just have to be aware that they are just that. Ideas.

If you don’t, you end up living in the illusion that others have created for you. And you’ll call it “reality.”