Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.
~Nelson Mandela~

Our passion fuels the emotion but our rationale justifies the intensity. Our emotions are no more than a correlation between remembered experiences, and thus when our mind associates the two together, and the past and present collide, you fear that your past is the reason you tread so cautiously into the future. But caution does not always manifest as a silent apprehension; sometimes it comes out as a prepared fighter entering into a battlefield.

Sometimes it is not as simple as allowing for the emotions to come back in, rather it is a form of approaching the wilderness, with no definite knowledge of what is to come except the only knowledge and visuals of old battle wounds.

These scars remind us that our past is real. ~Papa Roach~

Whichever strategies have failed, we disregard, and use only those strategies that once worked for us. Attack or defense?

The problem with over-strategising is that we don’t always account for variable change: each battle is different, and thus a variation of strategies will be used. Weapons and ammunition are altered to fit the style of battle; the grounds on which the warfare occurs, the weather and direction of the winds, and the opponent’s own strategies.

If words are my weapons, then every idea behind them are my most powerful ammunition.

We can’t always account for another’s strategies, because we cannot know for sure which ammunition they will load into their weapons: whether they play attack or defense; whether they surrender or engage and what not… The crucial difference, however, is that if you’re battling an old opponent, you’ve already had that time to study and understand that reason: to analyse their strategies and thus form your own game plan.

People say it all rests on game-plan, but the volatility of human emotion is the most dangerous enemy to encounter on a battlefield. Very few fighters have the ability to focus on the end game and know which battles from which to walk away; yet the few battles we deem reasonable to fight, we tend to enter into without second thought.

It’s about knowing when to walk away. 

Always focus on the end game and choose your battles wisely, for some battles will break a few bones, but as the injuries heal, you grow back stronger.

Some battles leave scars, but they are only there to remind us of the realities of our past.

Some battles tear us to pieces, and we end up in a coma for years.

Finally, there is that one battle that will ultimately kill you, and you die the ultimate death and return a drifter merely using your body.

If you’ve been through enough wars, you’d know which ones are worth the fight, and which to avoid so that you don’t die over and over again. As stated above, however, the volatility of human emotion truly is the worst enemy to encounter on a battlefield.

When you’ve died a thousand deaths, you are merely an evolution of drifters taking their place in this world.