Instructions for a Human Being

Before you begin,
please understand
that nobody knows
what they are doing here.

Not the people who raised you.
Not the people who taught you.
Not the people who speak about life
as though they have read
the final chapter.

Everyone is improvising.

Some have simply learned
to sound convincing
while they do it.

Rule One: Remember things incorrectly.

Your childhood will change
every time you revisit it.

The people you once feared
will become ordinary.
The people you barely noticed
will become important.

A sentence someone forgot saying
will live inside your head for years.

A thousand beautiful moments
will disappear without warning.

Do not assume
that what you remember most
is what mattered most.

Rule Two: Become someone.

Choose a name for yourself.
Collect a few ambitions.
Learn how to answer
when someone asks what you want
from your life.

You will spend years
building an identity
that can survive other people's opinions.

Then, one ordinary evening,
you will wonder
whether the person you have become
is someone you actually like.

This is normal.

Most people never ask.

Rule Three: Love people
without receiving a guarantee.

There is no contract
that makes a person stay.

No sentence
that makes them understand you.

No amount of goodness
that obligates the world
to be gentle in return.

Love them anyway.

Not because everything lasts,
but because something can be real
without being permanent.

Rule Four: Expect the ending.

Your possessions will outlive
some of your memories.

Your photographs will survive
the voices they were taken to preserve.

One day, someone will find
an old message you sent
and smile without knowing
what it cost you to write it.

You cannot prevent this.

You can only decide
what you want your presence
to mean while it lasts.

Rule Five: Do not skip ahead.

You will be tempted.

You will want to become
the person who has already succeeded,
already understood,
already forgiven everyone.

But there are things
that can only be learned
at the speed of living.

You cannot read the last page
and call it experience.

You cannot borrow another person's scars
and call it wisdom.

Some answers must arrive
after the questions
have changed you.

Rule Six: Leave room for error.

You will hurt people
you never intended to hurt.

You will misunderstand
people who were trying to love you.

You will sometimes mistake fear
for intuition
and pride for self-respect.

When you discover this,
do not waste your entire life
proving you were once right.

Apologize where you can.
Repair what you can.
Learn what you can.

Then continue.

You are not required
to remain the person
who made every mistake.

Final instruction:

When you reach the end,
do not look for a score.

There will be no official record
of how many mornings you survived,
how many times you began again,
or how often you chose kindness
when cruelty would have been easier.

Nobody will calculate
the distance between
who you were
and who you tried to become.

And if you are waiting
for someone to confirm
that you lived correctly,

you may wait forever.

So here is the only instruction
I can offer with any certainty:

Live carefully enough
to recognize what matters.

Live courageously enough
to reach for it.

And live honestly enough
to admit when you don't know
what comes next.

Because there is one thing
this manual cannot teach you.

One thing no one
can demonstrate beforehand.

One thing you will understand
only after you have done it.

How to live your life.

And perhaps that was the point
all along.

You were never meant
to follow these instructions.

You were meant to discover
that you are the human being
who has to write them.