Note To Self: Edit This

As your standing there watching the sky someday complacent and
displaced you’ll notice the stars bursting out of the night sky towards
earth like fireworks on the Fourth of July, and you’ll wonder what
brought us to that point so suddenly. You’ll probably also wonder
why there is so much beauty in destruction, in pain, in the pale face
of both birth and death.

They say Age is a gift, that there is a structure, a balance, a mapped
out metamorphosis of phases that we shoot through as the hands of time
roll around and around pointing at numbers without conscious or
empathy. It knows nothing of your heart’s pace speeding up and slowing
down to keep the rhythm of every thoughtless or dreary TICK TICK TICK,
nor does it have any purpose other then to remind us that where we are
now, things are often measured even if they are immeasurable.

Maybe it’s within our man made measurements that the TICK TICK TICK of
an ordinary clock can paralyze a soul. All it takes sometimes is just
one coldly calculated TICK to make us waste each passing second
wondering what we should be doing, who we should be doing it with,
where we should be going, and if we’re making the kind of choices we
can live with in death. Ironically that’s quite the oxymoron. There is
no thing to win. There is only living.

Whoever said don’t keep looking back, and keep moving forward was
right. Nostalgia is a warm blanket we keep with us to try to keep track
of some idea of a linear ideal of life. We try to piece together who we
are with torn up old letters and photographs aged and yellowed as if we
ourselves were some form of puzzle piece or unfinished work of art that
can be defined by things gone past when we are impossibly implausible
and completely capable of becoming someone we don’t recognize in the
mirror anymore. Whilst that is confusing, it’s not always necessarily
bad. We were all born to go down the rabbit hole, and nostalgia can
freeze frame us into a stasis Hell in which the TICK TICK TICK of a
clock becomes not only a vague reminder of our fleeting mortality, but
a Prison Guard.

I couldn’t tell you if Heroes or Villains exist or not. At some point
in our lives we have the potential to be both, as well as neither.
People will change. People will leave us. Loved ones will at some point
die, and there are no bets that you will still be the same person you
are today, tomorrow no matter how hard you try to hold onto your
ideals, to the things that make you feel solid, that remind you, that
keep you safe…

The faces WILL change, new wounds take hold of old scars and make old battles obsolete.

All that’s left in the end is what’s inside you, and how comfortable you are with whatever that is.

I once wrote that death is movement and we all move, and we must keep
doing so. If you think anything like I do then you probably understand
that death isn’t always a final thing, it can also mean a new beginning.

Even when we run out of energy to shed yet another skin, it
sometimes hurts so much more to be left trapped inside of an old one.

It’s sometimes agonizing to leave pieces of ourselves scattered
around as we move, to throw away old dreams to make room to breathe
life into new ones that through a series of circumstances that happened
for whatever reason are now more possible to reach. It hurts to grow.

We forget this in adulthood. We feel at some point we are done with our
growing pains, our journey or our internal metamorphosis and we come to
believe we will always be this caricature of a person that then goes
out solid into the world and accomplishes a linear set of things
written out for such a caricature. It’s why we’re so obsessed with our
youth, because youth is solid. Youth was linear. Growing up completely
is not.

Some people settle for a stasis because anything else would be too
scary to fathom when the hours grow long and we find ourselves alone
with our thoughts. They don’t believe they possess the strength to get
through it, or they doubt themselves, or they are just simply without
the Will or energy to conjure up the courage it takes to break a stasis.

Those kind of people don’t want thoughts that they can’t bend into a pretty lie to get them through the night.

No matter who you are, or how many times you lie to someone else,
it will never be as much as you will have lied to yourself.
Inadvertently or non.

Many people choose that path of quiet stasis… to assuage guilt that
threatens to rule them, to lay away accountability, to bury their heads
in a fantasy that helps them trip through their lives with the least
amount of resistance with a never ending avoidance of friction &
pain.

Some people choose not to love because love is a confusing anchor. So
they cut themselves off so they are free to go anywhere, do anything,
and most of those people end up going in circles, going nowhere, and
miserable.

Then, there are also the people who don’t, who jump into the water even
though they know there may be sharks lurking within it. That bat down
the wasp nests in the hopes of a future where they will not be stung
every time they walk under the patio overhang in the spring. Who enter
alone into a crowded party in which they know nobody. People who fight
for justice or speak an unpopular opinion because their perception
allows them to believe in it. People who sky dive, or inhale the
carcinogens of cigarettes and city air.

And people who choose to love something or someone with all their heart
with the knowledge they, or it may die, get lost, go away somehow or
disappoint them. I am bias but personally I believe the people who are
doing their best to live this way are wise. They know the difference
between cautious and reckless, they know the value of every experience.
They try not to take too much for granted. I for one want to live more
like them.

But either way no matter how we decide to play the game, life
always has the one up on us just as we think we‘ve gotten some kind of
a clue, and at some point… we will be standing there in stupid human
awe as the stars are bursting out of the night sky towards earth like
fireworks on the Fourth of July.

All the pettiness aside, and at risk of sounding cliché all that will remain in all that’s changed is love.

Somehow, as long as we allow ourselves to fully love, to trust, to
disperse of all that doesn’t really matter and only fight the battles
truly worth fighting… in the end it will all come together. You just
have to have faith, because without faith of any kind the TICK TICK
TICK will paralyze you, glaze over your eyes and make you tread paths
that weren’t really necessary for you to tread. To take you into
dimensions that forces you to recalibrate your soul just to wake up in
the morning with some kind of sense in your brain.

Real loves lies everywhere around you, and beneath you… we just have to
stop questioning everything so goddamn much, and maybe even, trying to
stop holding onto everything quite so hard. Stop trying to make the
illogical make some kind of logical sense, because that is in itself
not only pompous, but the very thing you strive against in the first
place if you think like that, The Illogical.

You’re wasting TICK TICK TICK’s and TOCK TOCK TOCK’s trying to solve a puzzle that has no beginning and no end. Sometimes we just need to let go and see what sweeps under us to catch us, and maybe be okay with the fact if nothing did, pick ourselves up, heal, rewind, and keep on walking, keep on dreaming, and keep on painting the mural with no beginning and no end until we inevitably die, but no matter how you choose to view things Death is the moot point. It’s what we had in life that matters, and

We’re still but only just human.

So, no more nightmares… just… the wind.