The delicacy of mood is a curious thing. The ways in which a few words, seconds of life, can impact the day to day feelings of an individual are a testament to the varied and powerful nature of existence. This is not always for the positive, of course, but it’s rare that things like this fall neatly into one camp or the other. The immense experiences of change that have come my way in the past few days trend more towards the negative or the neutral, and maybe that’s a matter of perspective.
The more hopeful among us would say exactly that. My therapist would have posited it this way as well- that there are just events. We assign them meaning. The absurdist in me would love to respond with the ridiculousness (absurdity?) of the assigned meaning being meaningful to anything but our own consciousness, but I digress. Things are happening, things are changing, and our reactions to these things are as entirely in our hands as any other part of them.
In that sense, one could twist it, we’re entirely at fault for how we feel. Bojack, the show, would posit that all we are, are just the things that we do. We’re responsible for our happiness, our sadness, our anger. These things are our burden to bear, and some would go the extra step and implying that burdening others with them is not quite our place either. There are our friends who support us, but maybe they don’t need to see every time Rome is burning. You can play the fiddle together.
But we know that’s not true. At least, I don’t think it is. At least, it isn’t fully true. There are some things affected by rapid change, something which we must acknowledge fully as being unsettling it and of itself, that warrant strong emotional reaction, and it’s okay to feel that way. There’s an unpredictability and a strength to understanding and accepting the turbulence of emotion for it’s up and its down and understanding that maybe it’s okay to not always be okay- that it’s part of it.
There’s some old line I read somewhere that states that a world without rain would just be a desert.
This is not to imply it is proper or otherwise acceptable to wallow, to get stuck, or to try not to change things. The beautiful tenacity of the human spirit exists in part for our ability to adapt, overcome, and grow in the face of this kind of adversity. Friends are there for that, too. In a time where we can feel more alone than ever, in a time when facemasks and distance and testing mean that we must be selective not only with who we see but how we see them, that can be hard to remember. Isolation sets in, and an isolated mind is as dangerous a thing as any other. The echo chamber inside one’s own head is damaging, and often incorrect.
“You don’t have to believe every single thought that tumbles through your head just ‘cause it sounds like you talking,” per the Crane Wives.
I’m writing this now on a swell of emotion because the past twenty-four hours have been uniquely trying. New discoveries, rapid change, the crumbling, it seems, of the world around me, and the constant reminding of running time and closing opportunities weighs as heavily as it can on someone not even a quarter of a century old. Not everything can be affected by my actions, or by my feelings, and it may not even require action on my part. But it is happening, and if it is happening without me, it only compounds the feeling of being able to participate fully in life. Of missing out. But that’s part of it too. The waves we feel. It’s a ride as much as it’s a game.
The reality is that before this, things were, subjectively, good. Things still are. There’s progress, if we can still associate with that with a positive tilt, and there’s more stability than one thinks. That you can feel the waves and not be buffeted by them means you’re standing on something firm. Maybe it’s just time to enjoy the ride, and see what comes next. It’s coming, whether you’re doing something about it or not.
Enjoy the ride as best you can.