Boston

My favorite part of my visit to Boston last week was walking aimlessly around the city.

Beautiful architecture and parks aside, it was nice to be back in a city filled with so many people — so many living, breathing stories of love, loss, searching and (with any luck) finding, never to be replicated in quite the same manner ever again.

While walking throughout the city and observing all of these stories unfold, I occasionally reflected, “what will my story be?”

On the last day of the trip, Julie Zhuo published a series of “unintuitive lessons” she wish she’d learned earlier that offered a timely response to this question: “There is no love without loss. There is no gain without risk. Shielding yourself from pain is closing yourself off to joy.”

The extent to which our stories are filled with love depends on our willingness to undertake the pain of loss. The amount of reward we might hope to reap depends on how much risk we are willing to accept.

One thing seems for certain though, the best story we might imagine for ourselves will not be great because we meticulously kept it pain free, but because we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable.