43. How honest you can be about yourself to other people.
44. That you can use your body to play with the little kids in your life and to tell them (and show them) that you love them.
45. That through your body, you can feel happiness and joy.
46. That through your body, you can feel sadness and pain and can grow and learn from that.
47. Being able to experience the unprecedented high that comes from realizing the million things that seemingly didn’t work out in the past was some universal conspiracy to bring you to exactly the right place, somewhere far beyond where you could have imagined for yourself. (It will happen if it hasn’t yet. Just wait.) 48. The ability to process the kind of unprecedented compassion that is displayed in the world daily but is sometimes overshadowed by the alternative.
49. Having eyes to see the love of your life, hands to hold them, and a mouth to speak to them, a gut instinct to know they are your soul mate, and a mind to understand that they agree.
50. How well you perform at your job.
51. How adamantly you stick to what you believe.
52. How fiercely you pursue that which you feel most called to.
53. How earnestly you can laugh at yourself.
54. How honest you are willing to be in regards to your shortcomings, and what you do in light of them, not in spite of them.
55. The tiny acts of kindness and courage that we perform daily, because at the end, that may be our only purpose here.
56. How often you make time to do the things you want, not the things that are expected of you.
57. That you stop judging and berating people for their own imperfections.
58. That you have the ability to hear the music you love.
59. That alternatively, you have the ability to feel the vibrations of music if you can’t hear it.
60. The knowing that the lack of one sense, one talent, one ability, does not lessen you; it defines you as someone cut out for a challenge
above others.
61. The understanding that the pursuit of physical beauty will eventually be futile—we all sag, wrinkle, and age the same in the end.
62. The genuine understanding that most of the time, you cannot equate your health to your appearance.
63. The genuine understanding that you have no right to judge someone else’s health by their appearance.
64. That you can use your body to perform the things you most truly love to do (write, dance, sing, what the hell ever).
65. That you use your body for sex: for good, consensual, wild sex when you want, where you want, and never for any other reason but that.
66. That your body is not for the consumption of others, and that there is never a reason to do something to it that doesn’t make you happy but will appease others.
67. That you are not at fault for how society views physical appearances, but you do have a responsibility to yourself to defy it consciously.
68. That you know what to say when the people you love are most hurting and need those words of comfort.
69. That you know when to shut the hell up and just be present for them.
70. That you know how to grieve and mourn the things that will inevitably pass.
71. That you know how to embrace and enjoy the things that will invariably pass.
72. That you donate the things you don’t need to the people who do need them.
73. That you don’t adopt other people’s confining, cruel words as your own.
74. That you make your own money to spend as you see fit.
75. How often you tell the people who you love that you love them while you have them, every day, in every way you can. Because you never know.
76. That you sacrifice when a sacrifice needs to be given.
77. That you have the ability to feel warmth and smell your childhood home and have your senses act as transmitters back to the things and people you would have otherwise forgotten about.
78. That you embrace love, no matter how scary it is.
79. That you are an honest person: in word, promise, work, and heart.
80. How able you are to put your ego aside and apologize when an apology is due.
81. How genuinely you apologize—it says a lot about a person.
82. How well you take care of yourself when you most need to be taken care of.
