Go Boldly Toward the Sun

Learning: Life is too short to spend time protecting ourselves from pain that’s unavoidable anyway.

An old friend visited yesterday, and I feel like somehow our conversation put my whole life suddenly in a different relief. Like I’ve been living in some dark fantasy spun out of others’ suffering. Which maybe is true…

But the point is I feel, at least right now at 2AM that some spell has been broken that’s kept me from really seeing how lovely my life right now is. How disconnected I’ve become. And how the fact that at 30 life feels like it is starting to catch up to me is no coincidence or phase but simply a representation of the reality that yes I am older and, yes, I’m starting to understand differently the term “grown up.”

I can’t help but feel this fear now that maybe I’ve been running away from the future, trying to escape an inevitability that I foresaw in some moment of existential clarity years ago. Despite which I simply turned the other way, intentionally ignorant to the truth that history repeats itself.

For months I’ve been suffering a certain malaise, that perhaps now may be labeled “denial.” Denial which I wonder isn’t suffered to some extent as a byproduct of all comfort as we seek solace from life’s harsher truths by covering them up with material distractions.

And that in doing so, I’ve somewhat been missing the point, which I’ve either forgotten or maybe never known (but forgotten I think). That in asking “is this it?” we usually fail to consider our wholeness. That we can’t be complete without bearing and wearing our scars. That often what we think we’re seeking is an illusion and what we need in order to “progress” is simply to accept what’s already there and let our souls guide us freed from the muddy water of conceit.

I wept last night. Tears for the reality of lost futures and fated struggles, for fake distances and false barriers. For the invisible cages we lock ourselves into in isolation over and over again seeking a sensory-deprived numbness until some small crack with light shining through reminds us how to break free and we fly for a time only to clip our own wings and build a new cage for fear of being burned by the sun... I think we learned the wrong lesson from Icarus.

The sushi tasted like a little bit of imperfection. It was perfect for the occasion.