The essence of life, I believe, is in its contradictions. It is, for instance, a contradiction that the thirteenth law of living life on your own terms is surrender.  

Living life on your own terms requires that you surrender to that which you cannot change. If you are going to live on your own terms, you need to ignore a lot of what goes on around you, in the culture. A lot of what goes on is driven by people’s insecurities, the desire for status, short term thinking, living out the dramas of childhood.  You surrender to that so that you can focus on the beauty that surrounds.

Near the end of the war, he was injured in an explosion which seriously impaired his vision. Told that his loss of sight would eventually be total, he decided to return to more familiar surroundings in France to continue his study of music and to prepare himself to leave the world of the sighted. “The sight of a pin,” he wrote, “a hair, a leaf, a glass of water—these filled me with tremendous excitement. The plants in the courtyards, the cobblestones, the lamp posts, the faces of strangers. I no longer took them in and bound them up in me, they retained their values, their identities. I went out to them, immersed myself in them and found them more beautiful than I ever dreamed they could be. They taught, they nourished when one gave oneself to them.”
- Robert Ellsberg from a profile of John Howard Griffin in The Catholic Worker:

John Howard Griffin was the author of Black Like Me. He unexpectedly regained his eyesight in 1957. He led a fascinating life as described on Wikipedia here.