by empty

I will be the best me I can be

This means:

I will not be perfect (perfection is an abstract ideal which ignores the complexity of the world and cannot be attained, but only sought after).

My "flaws" are part of my story

and they make my successes that much more triumphant.

I am who I am, and the core of my being is indestructible.

It may be hidden

or obscured

but it will always come back.

And when it does, I remember why I kept going while it was gone.

Today I listened to music and I felt emotions. I felt happy because I enjoyed the music. I felt love for my brothers. I felt sad because my brother is very ill. I felt glad that I could feel that love, and that I could feel compassion for someone that I hate. I felt hopeful, because I worried that I would not be able to feel these emotions.

The journey is more important than the destination.

Ideals give us something unattainable to strive for. Bound by the constraints of the human condition, we can only hope to get closer to an ideal. Infinity is unreachable, but it tells us which direction we should go. We cannot reach the sky by climbing mountains, but the sky gave us a reason to climb. We are far from omniscient, so we must grope dimly into the future as we make decisions. And sometimes we must fall away from a local optimum to reach an even greater height.

Simulated annealing is an optimization process where things get randomized, shaken up, to avoid getting stuck in local optima. It is named after the metallurgic process of annealing:

heat (metal or glass) and allow it to cool slowly, in order to remove internal stresses and toughen it.

In the beginning, the metal may contain imperfections which cause stress and make the alloy more fragile. In the heat, the molecules are shaken about and move freely. During the slow cooling phase, the molecules can settle into a tight lattice; the heat has shaken out the imperfections and stress. As a result, the alloy is made stronger.