Ed. Note: I began listening to Pandora about halfway through this post, and somehow landed on Beth Nielsen Chapman's "The Color of Roses." Seemed rather fitting.
This is not something you can rely on as gospel. It's just a bit of speculation and observation from someone who's watched, noticed, and thought entirely too much about it.
Life is not a highway. It's not a bowl of cherries. Nor is it a bitch (and then you die). It is not like a box of chocolates. It's an incredibly broad concept, a nonsensical term invented by foolish poets with a feather pen and a bottle of India ink. It's a very small word used to describe a very big thing. It's everything, and in that same strange vein, nothing at all. And because of all the things it describes, one can pretty easily attach any term to it and make it completely valid. "Life is good. Life sucks. That's life." It's a copout people use when they're too afraid to admit that they're in charge of their own destiny. It's rather easy to say "he leads a charmed life," or "life has dealt her a lousy hand," because it rests your world securely on the shoulders of some ambiguous, omnipotent force that tidily takes both the blame and the credit for anything that happens to you. I suppose it's a comforting thought to know that there's something to rely on to bring good things your way, along with something to blame when the shit hits the fan. I can see why the idea of "life" is so cherished among artists and writers, even therapists. But isn't it far more comforting and reassuring to think that perhaps the concept of "life" as it's described in sonnets and teenage angst drama doesn't truly exist, but that the nature of a person's fate lies squarely in their own hands?
Your first mistake is in thinking that "life" (aka "the world") owes you anything. People (or maybe it's just me) spend a great deal of time doing decent things, helping old ladies cross the street or volunteering for charity, partially because they genuinely want to help someone else, but I think also because we think somewhere in the romantic recesses of our minds, we hope there'll be some greater reward for it. Karma, just deserts, call it what you want. Somehow we figure what goes around will come around... whatever that means. I never really understood that expression. Even on those occasions when a person is about as good as one could aspire to be and still be considered human and still somehow gets gypped out of their happy ending (Princess Diana comes to mind), folks mop up the tragic tears with their handkerchiefs and imagine that somewhere beyond what our mortal eyes can see lies a place where the best of us find whatever it is they missed out on around here. There are no guarantees that that's ever going to be the case, but we believe it because we want so much to. We can never know if the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel truly exists, or if the life well-lived is its own reward. I've never had a conversation with Mother Theresa (and I couldn't at this point without a Ouija board), but she always seemed pretty happy marching around making the world a bit more of a brighter place. She treated the world as if she owed it a living, not the other way around. Maybe that's the secret.
What of the rest of us, who are a thousand leagues away from anything even remotely close to sainthood? Are we heathens because we're a little selfish, because we feel some faulty desire, however great or small, to earn ourselves a piece of whatever our own personal definition of happiness is? Is it simply a matter of wanting the wrong things, and is it even possible to consciously change what you want? It all goes back to what's under our power, I suppose. I guess I never really questioned why I wanted what I wanted or felt how I felt. Those were always things that just... happened. I suppose it hadn't occurred to me that maybe it's just all a matter of willpower. Maybe pining after things is just a spot of weakness in character. It only makes sense that we'd all be a little more content if we just wanted the attainable. But isn't it part of human nature to want what we don't have? Isn't that what ambition is all about? What happens when we get exactly what it is we want? Do we stop wanting it and move onto something else? Or does it become something kept on a peripheral shelf, a happy trinket within reach whenever we fall short of whatever else we set our eyes on?
For the seekers, the questioners, the worriers like myself, there may never be a satisfactory answer. I never throw anything away. My closet is stuffed to the gills that the majority of folks (including me, most of the time) think is useless, but that I refuse to throw away for the simple reason that I'm concerned that the minute I don't have something anymore is the very moment I'll start wanting it again. But life (ah! there's that word again) does not allow for unlimited closet space. I suppose all one can really do is try to hope for the little things that will fit. In the meantime, I'm keeping an empty space saved on that peripheral shelf, just in case.
The soundtrack to this blog post has been brought to you by Pandora: "Mellow Drama"
