Yes to Life

I finished reading Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything by Viktor Frankl. It really spoke to me as it has to many others. I wanted to quickly quote a paragraph from the end of the book that particularly addressed something that I've been thinking a lot about lately.

It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision “for all eternity”; that in every moment I can actualize the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities—and I can only choose one of them to actualize it. But in making the choice, I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to “never being,” and even this is for all eternity! But it is wonderful to know that the future—my own future and with it the future of the things, the people around me—is somehow, albeit to a very small extent, dependent on my decisions in every moment. Everything I realize through them, or “bring into the world,” as we have said, I save into reality and thus protect from transience.