but at least she isn’t standing still

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“She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.”

e.e.cummings

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Life never really makes it that easy for you.

Sure.

It gives you some incredibly beautiful and happy moments, but, in general, it kind of takes every opportunity to kick the shit out of you.

Now. Sometimes its a big kick and sometimes its just a bunch of small kicks but they all net out to basically one thing – what Life does to most of us is wear us down. Make us tired.

In fact, pretty quickly you find out that part of being an adult is basically a long series of conversations about how tired you are where you find yourself smiling sympathetically at someone who is telling you how tired they are as you stand there thinking there is no fucking way they are nearly as tired as you.

I say that just to make a point.

Because while those conversations happen, and most likely happen too often, most of us are not really tired. Seriously. I mean that. If you tear apart your tiredness I believe mots of us just wish there were more glimpses of color in a daily-ness of greys.

fluff-and-fold-colorYeah. I could be wrong, but, in general, I sense the grind of everyday life is kind of gray to people. It just bleeds a little more gray into every moment of a day.

Now. Let’s just call that the base from which all colors & non colors arise.

Now. Let’s call that our ‘hell.’ Gray.

That said. Underneath everyone’s Life runs an underground river of happiness & satisfaction & colors <yes, I do believe those suffering from depression have an underground river flowing with sadness & despair & blacks>.

The water is always flowing but sometimes/often we don’t always see it or taste it. And that is where I believe ‘stop and smell the roses’ is slightly off because I think it is more ‘pause and smell the roses.’

You only still yourself for a moment or two to enjoy some color within the gray. But. You don’t really stop.

It’s like my underground river metaphor.

You can pause at some water fountain and refresh yourself. And then move on. But if you stop and try and drill down to the underground river, well, the world doesn’t stop. So while you are working hard to drill down to something you certainly know is worthwhile all the rest of the world, gray as it is, is chugging right along.

The problem here is you say you are successful because you have drilled down and drink deep of the freshest and clearest of the happiness water and you smile refreshed. You have not only completed a task, and a worthy one, that task offers a very satisfying result.

Ok. A task result, not an impact result.

I say that because when you stand up to move on you have actually compounded your Life issue. You are now refreshed, but farther behind or maybe caught in some unrecognizable place because not only is everything a little, or a lot, gray — its a different gray spot than when you stopped.

I use the metaphor to make a point.

It may sometimes feel like we are going through some version of a daily hell, but most of us do so not standing still because we know moving is really the only way to access some of the true colors available to us in Life or access some of the freshest of fresh water to refresh ourselves.standing-still-stars-world-moving

Underground rivers appear in oasis, in above ground rivers, fountains and waterfalls. You just got to find them without stopping to drill down for them. And you don’t find them by standing still. You find them by not being still.

Look. Most of us are fairly invulnerable to the gray of Life. Aggravating to us, maybe even a little hellish to us, but not that dangerous to our overall existence.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is because, well, at least we are not standing still.

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Written by Bruce