A Thing I Have Learned
(Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish
we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d
worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more
popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done
more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and
the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t
have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and
to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted
you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our
time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real
problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and
wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been
better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening
as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person
or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We
don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to
hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to
have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of
wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just
have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and
listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we
are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.
We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything,
because we are already infinite.
While we are alive we always contain a future of
multifarious possibility.
So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s
occasionally look up from the
spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be
standing, the sky above goes on
for ever.
Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible
for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life
seems full of hope. Potential. The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.
Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief,
heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No.
But do I want to live?
Yes. Yes.
A thousand times, yes.
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