“Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings: ” I was out for a walk, it was an evening in May.” You walk, the moon has just risen, you feel lazy, vacant, a little empty. And then suddenly you think: “Something has happened.” No matter what: a slight rustling in the shadow, a small silhouette crossing the street. But this paltry event is not like the others: suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist and you tell yourself, “Something is beginning.” 

“Something is beginning in order to end.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I know if you smile at someone and they smile back you’ve just decided that something shitty is going to happen. You might have a nice couple of dates but then she’ll stop calling you back and that will feel shitty or you will date for a long time and then she will have sex with one of your friends or you will with one of hers and that will be shitty. Or you will get married and it won’t work out and you will get divorced and split your friends and money and that is horrible. Or you will meet the perfect person whom you love infinitely and you even argue well and you grow together and you have children and then you get old together and then she’s gonna die.”

–Louis C.K.

The courage to be exists when, while taking this into account, one begins regardless.