Faith

It has become evident to me that faith is paramount to life.  It is a thing that religion gets fundamentally correct, at base, and it is important that we all see the more abstract notion of faith, divorced from any baggage of guilt or the sabotage of our personal histories regarding what we've been told to think, or reacted to, regarding religion.

Faith is vital.  We must believe in the future.  We must come to an emotional or philosophical, or even a hold-me-by-my-hips kind of need or want to aim into the future, not for personal gain, for laziness, sloth, etc., but because we can fathom a future of betterness, improvement, constant development, and where we matter. --

Not where we tell ourselves we matter, or where ambition flouts about for ambition's sake.  But a future that we somehow fundamentally believe in, because it matters.  Because it matters without a because.  It matters.  That's the faith part, at once intoxicatingly simple to say and disregard and hideously difficult to practice and hold steady and strong.  But that is what we need, make no mistake, and we will go about trying to find it.  Better to be clear about what we're looking for first, before embarking.