My current take on life is consciously local. It's like navigating and un-charted differentiable manifold towards some place with loving properties; think justice, hapiness and peace for the sake of argument. This place is not necessarily void of struggle, but it might. Such properties are hard, if not impossible, to define; so reaching them intentionally is at least harder, unless one is already there (totally plausible, so this becomes a question of perception). To move, I use a bundle of evolving heart-felt principles, rules-of-thumb, traditional maxims and bare intuitions that just set the direction and motion (a derivative, if you will). Movement is triggered by a fool's certainity that something has to be said or done; no trade-off analysis. This could be proven to lead to the loving place, if such a derivative happens to follow a path of least resistance and the ideal region surrounds a critical point (at this point this seems actually like a symplectic manifold). I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.