I'm still here

"Events in time very rarely effect other time, soul wise. The moment you’re dying of cancer, that night spent banging the seven Hawaiian tropic models is a distant and unimportant memory that may have just as well been a movie you saw somewhere and the moment you’re up there watching your son getting sworn in as the president, that night a few years back where you sat there and contemplated chugging the bottle of drano because you were so broken up about your job seems likewise a dream.

...

The only things that really tie it all together are unproductive and shitty emotions like regret and anger. Happiness is like being hot. If you’re hot as balls and you’re sweating and about to just pass out and you can’t even see straight, you can jump into a pool or walk into an air conditioned room and BOOM! You’re no longer hot. You’re readjusted. Happiness is that fleeting.

Sadness, anger, regret, despair, and depression (which of course is a chronic and highly resistant cousin of these other negative emotions) are like being cold. You can get indoors, crawl under the blankets, or scoot into the hot bath, but you’re still cold. The residual shivers still get you. Your fingertips burn and you’re left with the unshakable physical reminder that you were very, very cold recently. Happiness rarely can trump something shitty happening right on its heels. SO, you get a promotion but your brother gets thrown in jail on the same day, you’re gonna be sad. If you find an out of print record you love in the bargain bin but some douchebag spits on you from the moving bus window, day’s ruined. That’s why sorrow is so enduring in this world. People remember it, and they want to because for whatever reason, the bad stuff seems like the stuff that defines us, not the good stuff.

...

No one wins life. Everyone dies and everyone has a great and fascinating list of successes and failures, joys and pains and unbearable ways that they’ve been fucked over or fucked someone else over and it’s all really nothing but the rich pageant of what being alive is (to paraphrase M. Stipe). There’s no reason to think that you’re fucked or there’s no way out because of some pressing immediate issue that you have. There’s one way out of this life, and you can’t get back in afterwards. And everyone goes there and everyone leaves dissatisfied if they don’t work actively on focusing as much on the good as they’re naturally inclined to do with the bad.

And there’s SO much good stuff here- You wouldn’t even have the ability to think about how bad you think you have it if it weren’t for all the wonderful things you love that seem to be endangered by whatever your issues are (and we all have these issues)- that the notion that you need to sequester yourself from joy to deal with the fact that you need to sit there and focus on your sadness is inhumane. It’s monk style shit. And here’s the part that everyone forgets, or chooses for some crazy reason to ignore: it’s COMPLETELY SELF IMPOSED! No thanks.

People think that the secret to winning in life is skating through without anything bad happening to them, but that’s bullshit. That’s impossible. Life shits on everyone. It’s not how little happens to you. It’s how you deal with what happens to you. That’s the measure of a person. That’s winning. Just saying. No one is alone. Kay? Good."
via bad sandwich chronicles.

I know I praise this blog often, and that posting this is a poor excuse for doing an actual post, but these are important thoughts that people should read.

Maybe I'm drawn to them because until recently I was fighting a bad case of being bummed. I'll never take for granted how relatively good I have it after spending a month working with a single mother in her 30's who has to work at Starbucks to support her kid, but it's pretty hard to face months of an unresponsive job market when all you want to do is do something gainful. The silence is worse than the rejection, and I started to feel like those satellites that send signal after signal into empty space and get nothing back. It was unfulfilling and exhausting and made it easy to focus on how bad it sucks to be unemployed and running out of money and 3000 miles away from home on the premise that you were going to make it on your own. And that stuff isn't even that bad in and of themselves. It's just the constant trying and the dragging of time that pulls them into happiness-preventing monsters.

But the important thing is that Mr. Kelly is right. There IS so much good stuff here and there, and even though life shits on everyone (perhaps more so now because of the times we live in) we should try to jump into the pool and cool off as often as we can. Fleeting happiness be damned.