The real world actually tastes gray. I see that now.

There is no strong sense of good or bad, or of anyone really getting exactly what they deserve.

There is no stimulant keeping you up all the time nor some great tragedy that is keeping you down.

To be a king that is the price. To see the world in its colorless shades and to have the will to keep moving even so. For the purpose of life is to live and anything more has as much proving its opposite as the amounts in support of it.

Humanity today has grown weak because from the day it is born it is surrounded by a reflection of what we want the world to be disconnected from what it is. The gap growing ever wider. Until most men and women of our time can only persist in a specific context, their spirits and wills breaking apart at ever smaller variations in their local environment.

I do not know if that is a death knell of a failed culture, but I do know that what cannot adapt cannot lead. What cannot see beyond its own comforts and beliefs cannot persist.

The long view by its very nature requires to calm your heart, your mind, your spirit, such that you can see the world as it is, and yourself as close to what you really are in relation to it.

Leadership is not a joyful experience. Nor a joyless one. It is to simply be and to see things just as they are.

Today, most of humanity no longer has the capacity to move without music in their ears, honey on their tongue, and colors blinding to the eyes.

When you realize real change requires you to tone down your senses, you find out that now nothing leaves a strong taste, and you can only respond in terms of what you think ought to be, instead of what feels good, or what makes you feel strongly, or what excites you. To win you must learn to walk the gray, even if it never ends. To look beyond the bread and circuses, to fully bond with your local reality starting from your own perspective while capable of comprehending that of those beyond yourself.

From such a capacity are things like discipline, good conduct, ethics, rationality born.

The most dangerous thing a man can do is to become a gear in somebody else's machine. Man must free himself. Even from himself. A distance enough to recognize himself and how he may be changed as needed in this world for him to survive or thrive or make a change.

Man must chain himself. His very nature to his reason. His emotions, his joys, his sorrows, all must be a persistent flicker of light that never fades away altogether, and yet can never fully flare and control a man's reason without the permission of that reason.

You will feel empty, not as empty as the void itself, but close, too close for most to handle, and you will learn to walk that path, as steady as those who need a thousand types of succor just to get along with their day. Every day.

That is what it means to be fit to rule. To live in that gray reality that most won't dare see or remember. For it breaks them.