Others will almost certainly tell you at some point in your life what it is that you can or cannot do and be. It is vital to reject that script and to unrelentingly create your morals and your meaning independently. There will be a price for this choice, and you must pay it without hesitation. The examples below are the ones history remembers, there are probably countless other stories like this that history does not. But that doesn’t matter, you stay unrelenting regardless, the best you can.

I first sat in a room full of Rothkos at MoMA in late 2006 or early 2007. I had come to New York with my family and somehow ended up in that room full of giant rectangles of color. I had no idea what I was looking at or who Mark Rothko was at the time. I sat there for what felt like eternity, staring at life-size fields of color that evoked a strong feeling, drawing me in for reasons I could not name. I just know it mattered because I have never stopped chasing that feeling since.

Most people encounter Apollo and Dionysus through Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where they serve as shorthand for the duality between order and chaos, logic and feeling, the Apollonian dream and the Dionysian frenzy. Nietzsche argued that great art, and by extension great living, holds both without letting either win.