Feeling pessimistic has such a negative stigma these days. I remember when feeling sad about life and yourself was an organic way to handle insurmountable contradictions. I regret that now it means something is wrong with you.

I see those moments of intense melancholy in a different way now. More like a state of vague dreaminess that nests in indoor spaces.

Whenever I find anything lost by anyone, I try my best to help getting it back to its owner, because that owner could be me someday, feeling a sudden sense of vertigo for the loss, as if standing on top of a high bridge and looking down.

I’d like to think that everyone has different kinds of secrets. There are those ones that you want to share with your closest circle, mostly concerning other people, and those ones you simply cannot share with anyone. Those ones are about yourself.

I believe that the drawback of having expectations for something, or someone, is the huge amount of uncertainty that it awakens. Sometimes, when I teach, I tell my students that my only job is to lower their expectations: it’s a powerful blessing in disguise.

Sometimes I feel like if I would apologize less and protest more I would be better off somehow. I then realize that the problem is not how often we do it, but how we do it, and when we do it.

I remember when I went once to a fortune teller. She told me a lot of awful things. I got so upset that I told her she was absolutely wrong. She’s out of business now. From that moment on I started creating my own answers.

Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi created the famous Ponzi scheme. He came to US with $2.50 in his pocket and made $4.5 million. Of course he lost everything. He died at 66, completely penniless.

Like a needle getting stuck on an old record, obsessive-compulsive disorder causes you to get stuck on a particular thought or urge, like washing your hands over and over.