Saturday, October 26, 2013

I Should Mark This

The contemplative life is attractive to me, but it's possible it's not for the right reasons. I get how people so comfortable with an interior life would be destined to live this kind of battle out in the streets.

What mean streets these are!

But this day, having spent several hours outside of work and totally immersed in my friends' lives and problems and issues, where I feared their issues would only magnify my sadness and provide such deep contrast to that unshakeable, unnameable regular guest-of-my-brain, that being with them would leave me tired and depressed and lonely, I've only ended up learning so many things from these girls I've called my friends for decades, from their problems and realizations and the way they deal with everything.

They worry and laugh and talk excitedly and passionately about weddings and families and siblings and children and careers and vocations and all sorts of busy, busy things that somehow in a weird, practical, domestic and strange realization I saw somehow the point of all life.

That, for some arbitrary reason, I've been put in charge of this creature (my body, my preferences, my proclivities, my tendencies, my fucking neuroses), and this is the only chance I get to participate in the world. And so the world is a game, and the cards are everything, and you will be rewarded every day for how you play those cards.

That it doesn't matter which cards they were, but what matters is if you have the guts to call life's bluff and wager on this creature, that it can thrive in this crazy, moving, dying/living biosphere, that it can create relevant goals and meet them against all odds, in spite of and because of previous histories of people with lesser or more, just battling it out with life and savoring every freaking moment that you can.

Every moment.

The pain, the joy, the sadness, the failures, the successes, the worries, the beauty--each of these are better than that void, that nameless void, that you for some reason keep wanting to go to when things get too hard.

Life can sometimes get so beautiful your heart breaks, and I'll take that heartbreak any time, over surrendering this body to the elements.

WHAT A DAY.

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