I like to live my life in quotes. Tiny bits of inspiration and demise that ingrain in my brain and refuse to leave no matter the medicine. A woman’s look, a jagged teacher’s scowl, unintended slivers of approval and rejection weave their way through your spider web and form the silk fabric called your life. How to handle the bleak vastness of it all?

Come as you are.

Taken out of context, out of the original environment, placed into a new sphere, movie quotes, lyrics, bits of spoken words, they inspire no matter the journey. Part of getting through life is just figuring out ways to keep your inspiration burning hot and to maintain that lust for continued existence. That clique, that over done plot line, that thing that gets me up in the morning.

The Gods envy us.

How does watching Natalie Portman blow up Parliament with a train load of explosives in V for Vendetta make the challenge of my PhD easier to handle? She’s fighting political oppression in a 1984-Orwellian future London and I’m sitting in a present day office enjoying a well paid PhD job and depressed with screwing things up.

But somehow it works.

Somehow watching her beaten down by V and reborn without fear makes the fool stress and confusion abate.

Abstraction, take an element of one thing, and transpose it onto another. Like tracing an image of the Earth on to the shadow of the Moon.

Where’s your will to be weird?

Take Edward Norton’s character from Fight Club and transpose it onto my situation. Replace a boring insurance job with the mundane details of a research project. Take out the influence of loveless fathers, replace with indifferent teachers, and use mountaineering instead of bare knuckle boxing.

Instead of physically challenging myself with destructive acts like bare knuckle boxing I climb mountains and balance on rock ridges.

All the elements are there to form a transition from the mundane to confident researcher, morphed into weekend mountaineering warrior. For some reason, things just click.

Does this mean you should take all the elements from your favorite movie and mold your life around them? Ah, no…that’s like stalking the person you think you’re connected to, the one who doesn’t love you back. That’s like falling for Mary, she only makes you feel good about yourself, but it’s not love that you feel, it’s just an unhealthy obsession.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Find those elements of inspiration that work and extract what you need to make your journey through life easier to bear and figure out.

Then the mountains and the work and the broken flowers don’t seem so fatal and maybe the vastness of your life becomes digestible.