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There may be moments in your life when you have to choose between ‘being liked’ and what you really want to do. Imagine your future spouse is a vegan and does not enjoy being with people who eat meat. Could you imagine putting aside your beliefs and feelings, to show support, love and understanding for your partner’s?

True empathy is not about waiting to understand another person; it is about proactively seeking to do so. It takes effort to give another person your full time and attention; to ask others how they are feeling and if they coping well with things. And don’t overlook those closest to you. Never take anyone for granted. Avoid being too preoccupied to sit down and talk with your children, partners and colleagues.

Knowing when you don’t know the answer and being honest about it is one of the greatest skills you can have. If you aim to be perfect, you’ll only end up disappointed. When you admit your blind spots, people will flock to support you.

You might look at someone successful and think they got lucky – a case of being in the right place at the right time perhaps? The truth is, every piece of good fortune is the result of hours, or even years, of hard work and preparation.

Thankfully, life is a university. Everything that you do or experience can teach you something, triggering inside you new thoughts, insights and realizations. You might be inclined to forget or ignore experiences that did not go well. Don’t. Learning from your mistakes and things that cause you pain is invaluable. The greatest lessons can come from the lowest moments in your life.

Once in a while you’re momentarily conscious of being happy. But I’m superstitious, and I picture Fate—best be respectful, and use a capital F—as a misty presence somewhere up in the sky but not too far away. Always listening, alert and ready to punish forbidden optimism.

I like women, I never run them down as somehow inferior to men, and I have a contempt for men who do. And I think, for one thing, that women are just as principled as men—but they sure as hell aren’t the same kind of principles.

“Si, a lot of men make far greater sacrifices than he will. For the good of the country.”

“But he wouldn’t even be consulted about it!”

“Neither are they; they’re drafted into the army.”

“Well, maybe they should be asked, too.”

He genuinely didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s wrong to force a man to join an army and kill other people against his own wishes.”

They just looked at me. What I was saying was really incomprehensible to them.

Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise.

After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place that is filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing what we seek.

I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decision of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician’s who made a decision of profound consequence.

I had the evening to kill, but it didn’t want to die and fought back.

When you’ve heard one bagpipe tune you’ve heard them both.