Battles: winning or learning?

I was just sitting talking to Dad over a 'cuppa' (queen's english: translation: noun & verb: a hot cup of tea with honey as well as the process of drinking this warm beverage which is rumoured to solve the world's unhappiness and tragedies). And he reminded me of an email that my eldest sister forwarded the other week:

There comes a point in your life when you  realise who matters,
who never did, who won't anymore... and who always will.
So, don't worry about people from your past,
there's a reason why they didn't make it to your future.

Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some
kind of battle.

I think the last line resonates a beautiful message. We balance between chance and control. There are some things that I think we want to think are in the hands of fate/chance/luck. But I think we give way too much credit to these forces. I think that we think that things are the way they are because there is no other way that they could be. But this is bullshit. We fall in to the trap of thinking that habits are hard-wired. They are not. You can change your habits and consequently change the luck which lays upon you. Of course we cannot control everything. Although some of us will die trying. Not me. But we can control what we present to the world. The irony of this is that I write this whilst procrastinating about writing a god damn cover letter... argh... not sure if the real world is better or if dreaming is where it's at. Was it Yeats who said that to dream is to awaken?