feeling uninspired

prompts are a great way to get writing. i like writing essays because it doesn't come as a serious struggle for me... usually. today, i'm trying to write my last essay for my english class and the prompt is this: "I want you to write an essay that says something important about how to live in the world." pardon me if that isn't the broadest essay prompt you've ever read. i have this problem where i take on a project and, rather than having a concise yet fluid point, i creep into every minute crevice that involves the topic because i'm worried that i won't hit each valid and crucial point. if you were to write a four to six page essay on how to live well, what would you write about? which texts might you choose to reference? i'm limited to the texts in my class but i would still love to hear where the ideas of others may roam.

but anyways, i'm feeling uninspired and am referencing a required reading in our class that was also required in a similar class i took a whopping five years ago - and it's just a beautiful as it was then. have a read of the closing paragraph if you're in the mood for some existential sadness.

"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children." (Joyas Volardoras, Brian Doyle)