this huge and wondrous bewildering brilliant horrible world

——- 

You don’t appreciate the chaos and absurdity of life on this planet. 

You don’t understand irony, or ethnicity, or eccentricity, or poetry, or the simple joy of being a regular at the diner on your block. 

I love that.

 You don’t drink coffee or alcohol. You don’t over eat. You don’t cry when you’re alone. You don’t understand sarcasm. You plod through life in a neat, colorless, caffeine free, dairy free, conflict free way.

I’m bold and angry and tortured and tremendous and I notice when someone has changed their hair part, or when someone is wearing two very distinctly different shades of black or when someone changes the natural temperament of their voice on the phone.

I don’t give out empty praise.

I’m not complacent or well-adjusted.

I can’t spend fifteen minutes breathing and stretching and getting in touch with myself.

I can’t spend three minutes finishing an article.

I check my answering machine nine times every day and I can’t sleep at night because I feel that there is so much to do and fix and change in the world, and I wonder every day if I am making a difference and if I will ever express the greatness within me, or if I will remain forever paralyzed by muddled madness inside my head. 

I’ve wept on every birthday I’ve ever had because life is huge and fleeting and I hate certain people and certain shoes and I feel that life is terribly unfair and sometimes beautiful and wonderful and extraordinary but also numbing and horrifying and insurmountable and I hate myself a lot of the time.

The rest of the time I adore myself and I adore my life in this city and in this world we live in.

This huge and wondrous, bewildering, brilliant, horrible world.”

=

Jessica, from Kissing Jessica Stein

——–

Well. I love this monologue pulled from Kissing Jessica Stein.

I love that it sounds like she is a disaster, but it really reflects the complexity residing in, well, any and all of us.

What do I mean? I believe that within each of us resides a kaleidoscope of fragmented pieces of different people and feelings and likes & dislikes. And all of these things swirl around viewing the world from a variety of perspectives.

All of which tends to end up muddling things in our heads and make us question whether we are being the best we can be.

And if we question whether we are at our best then we certainly question whether we are making a difference.

Yeah. There is an inextricable link between those two things.

Yeah. We don’t make that connection enough.

Hmmmmm. Maybe that is why the world is so brilliant … and bewildering.

Brilliant in that we can see the change that can, and could, be. In us and in the world.

That is called Hope.

Bewildering in that because aligning our ‘best’ to when we can actually make a difference <which is a moment that occurs significantly less often than you would imagine> is sometimes difficult to see and experience.

That creates something called Despair.

And therein lies the huge & wondrous & bewildering & brilliant & horribleness of the world … the constant tug of war between hope & despair. That may sound extreme … if not poetic and possibly even too philosophical … but if you think about it … our moments in life are far too often simply defined by feelings of hope <for something better> or despair <that the moment wasn’t the best it could, or should, have been … and maybe it never will be>.

I tried to think of an example of the constant tug between the bewildering & brilliance … that almost irreconcilable angst of hope clashing with despair … and then I found this:

——-

bookmad:

do you ever just think about how shitty you are compared to other writers and give up hope?

Step 1.

Go on goodreads

Step 1.

Look up any book you think is worthy of 5 stars, look at the break down of the star rating.

Someone, somewhere thought that book was a 1 star.

Step 2.

Now go to a book you rate as 1 star.

Again go to the break down… I bet someone has rated it 5 star worthy.

Step 3.

Stop being so hard on yourself.

Someone will love what you’ve written.

Yes, it’s important to be proud of what you’re doing, but I guarantee you are being too hard on yourself.

——-

Lastly. To be clear. The huge and wondrous and horrible bewildering brilliant thing is not really the world. It is us. It is our heads.

We each hold a desire to be huge & wondrous & as brilliant as we can be. In feeling that we naturally get tugged between hope & despair all the while struggling between them in the infiniteness of a relatively indifferent world chuckling at our attempts.

I do tend to believe everyone, at least a little, longs for something big. That is simply being human. Yet most of us are taught day after day after day to collect wood and do tasks. Wood?

—–

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

—–

Yeah. The world, society, business, our managers, are more likely than not to encourage us, and focus us, on collecting wood (metaphor for ‘doing’, tasks and “the grind” type stuff). However, most of us long for the immensity of the sea.

That conflict can often make life be quite bewildering and, worse, we can often look like a disaster to ourselves.Oh. And there will never be a lack of people ready to point out that disaster.

Ignore them.

Just appreciate the irony, the absurdity, the chaos, the huge & brilliance & wondrous aspects of the world.

Adore it and embrace it.

You will not only be a little calmer about shit, but you most likely will not actually be a disaster and, if you work hard, get a little lucky, you may get to enjoy the immensity of the world.