As writer and media strategist Ryan Holiday has noted, epiphanies are not life-altering.9 It’s not radical moments of action that give us long-lasting, permeating change — it’s the restructuring of our habits. The idea is what science philosopher Thomas Kuhn dubbed a “paradigm shift.” Kuhn suggested we don’t change our lives in flashes of brilliance, but through a slow process in which assumptions unravel and require new explanations. It’s in these periods of flux that microshifts happen and breakthrough-level change begins to take shape.

Today may be your last chance to be you, someone you forgot to completely immerse yourself in because you were too worried about the details. The details that, no matter how many times you thought them through, brought you no closer to understanding. They just tied up your mind and prevented you from really letting in the things you love. Your demon that is standing before the beautiful floodgate and is keeping you in a dehydrated nothingness.

Give him permission to walk away. He is not your keeper. You are his.

Make your life a safe haven in which only people that have the capacity to care and listen and connect are allowed. You are not responsible for saving people.