It was a lesson the world had already taught me and was teaching me still. You don't know what's possible until you actually see it.

By concentrating on what I was grateful for, I was able to stave off despair.

It is an obvious fact that you can never look ahead with clarity at your own future or anybody else's. You can't know what will happen until it happens. Or maybe it dawns on you the split second before, when you get a glimpse of your own fate.

I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn't know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me-maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.

What was reckless, I decided, was the way people were writing off huge swaths of the world as unsafe, unstable, unfriendly, when all they needed to do was go and see for themselves

Something happens when you are alone most of the time, when there are no distractions. Your mind grows more powerful--muscular, even. It takes over and starts to carry you.