The Weight of Nothing

Tell me the weight of a snowflake, a coal mouse asked a wild dove.
Nothing more than nothing, was the answer.
In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story, the coal mouse said.
I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow heavily, not in a raging blizzard, no, just like a dream, without any wound and without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles in my branch. Their number was exactly 3,714,952.
When the 3,714,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more that nothing as you would say, the branch broke off.
Having said that, the coal mouse flew away.
The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself, “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace in the world.”

-read somewhere

Quotables

We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose the time of our birth, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness…. we do choose how we live.

-Anonymous

How do you choose to live? I can sit and whine all day about how tough life is. I can blame everyone around me. I can blame myself and just wallow in self-pity. But I have sto stop and ask, does doing this improve my situation?