Everybody Fears

Everything is a lot scarier past 1am. I don’t mean the physical fear of the heightened darkness and decreased visibility that comes with the dead of night. I am speaking of the feelings that accompany staying awake past the end of the day. There is something about consciously peering past the curtain that defines the days that stirs up emotions and ideas that unsettle and perturb me, even on my best days. Past the end of the day, I consistently find my thoughts stuck on the impermanent and temporary nature of everything we touch. I go from loving and joyful reminiscences about my wonderful friends to aching heartbreak over the fact we are all saddled with finite time and a limited physical form. Every tragedy is borne out of love, and I would so dearly love to be with all of my friends all of the time. I do know that love and joy flow entirely from the fact we are all limited by time and the material world, yet still I yearn. 

I have had times in my life where I try to set a goal that once met, I will consider my life to be going well. I’ve moved away from rigidly using my “do something cool with my friends at least once a week” new year’s 2022 resolution as a marker of how my life’s going, but it remains a pretty good guide. In trying to stay alive and happy, that goal has managed to be met pretty much every week for the past 2 years. A lot of life is trying to set these little goals and meet them, and though you will likely never be totally satisfied and perfectly happy, there will be fleeting moments that will remind you why you must continue to play the game. This moment may be driving your friend home at 1am listening to Carly Rae Jepsen, it may be playing a fucking video game, or it may be watching an incredible movie (it’s usually this for me). One of the most important things that I have learned from being alive is that there are no answers. Art is often the best place to really see this, but if you really get out there and live you’ll see it around you too. There is no prescriptive answer that fits every life, that fits every situation, or that fits every person. Everything must be navigated as a new challenge, and the only thing you can ever count on is that nothing lasts forever. This sounds sad - and it frequently is - but “absence makes the heart grow fonder” really is the way shit works. The impermanence of everything; friends, locations, time itself; makes all of those things matter so much more. Every second spent with those you love is the most important second because you can never know if you’ll get any more.

This is not to say you should ever covet. You should never cling to life such that you paralyze yourself trying to do everything in the present. While you cannot count on the future, you must act as if you can. There is no other option! To entirely refuse to engage with the future is figurative suicide, leading only to despair and failure to live at all. 

Try to appreciate the moments you have. Try to surround yourself with people who you really do love. Try to live your life!