Dear self,

You are at a point in your life where you have to make lots of decisions.

While they are not overly dramatically life-alterating, it's hard not to think that each small decision you make is going to impact the course of your life as a whole, since life is really made up of the little, seemingly trivial choices that we make everyday.

It is frightening, overwhelming, almost crippling, how much power you seem to have over your own life.

It is frightening to think that you might miss the boat, and that rare opportunities like these might not ever come your way again. It is frightening to think that in 5 years you will look back at these moments and think, if I had done things differently, all my goals could have been met.

It is frightening that you don't really know for sure what to do, that you don't really know for sure how things will go.

But I invite you to consider this:

You can only make sure that you go with the most wholesome of intentions, and respond to life with all the mindfulness and wisdom that you can muster given the present conditions.

The rest is out of your control.

You can only do your best given the present conditions, and that has to be enough. To demand that you do anything more than what is within your capacity is to demand that you be something other than what you are now, which is both foolish and cruel.

While you do have free choice to some extent, it is delusional to think that you can control every little circumstance that leads to an outcome. If the causes and conditions for something to happen are there, they will happen. All you can do is do all you can to put in good causes for the outcome that you want.

Yesterday Ajahn spoke about the dependent origination in simple terms: there are past causes that lead to present results, which are not in our control. What we can affect are present causes, which lead to future results.

I was listening to Ajahn Thanissaro recently (either this or this), who said something like, "the present intention comes before the results of prior actions". This means that your present intention in how you approach the situation is more important than what is happening to you. A lot of what happens to you is due to past causes, which are no longer in your control. What is in your control is how you react to them given your present intentions.

Right Intention is one of the factors of the Eightfold Path. It falls under the category of wisdom or pañña. I have come to understand intention as the arrow that leads you in a certain direction. Speech and action cannot follow if there is not first an intention to speak or act. Thus intention is the essence of kamma. It directs your speech and action accordingly.

If you take care of your intention, you don't have to worry about the outcome. If the result is still shit, then you can rest easy that you did all you could on your part and the rest was out of your control.

Beings are the owners of their kamma, heir to their kamma, born of their kamma, related through their kamma, and have their kamma as their arbitrator. Kamma is what creates distinctions among beings in terms of coarseness & refinement. 

P.S. another epic talk: Intention is Kamma by Ajahn Siripañño.
Edit: of course Ajahn Brahm has done a talk with the same title haha it's great here it is.