fighting

Life is supposed to easier than this. It just is.

To keep us from jumping off cliffs and slitting our wrists and ending it all in one fell swoop. It should have some kind of survival mechanism. Make itself easier for us mere mortals to handle it so that it could go on for another day.

And the masses respond....
"life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it...."

I, too, used to believe in that. But lately, lately it seems like life just happens. It just throws things at you, it turns upside down, it doesn't give you time to catch up. So no matter how fast you run, no matter how much you try to turn things right, no matter how you react, nothing changes. You feel the same because the situation is the same.

But i do agree that there must be a way to deal with it all better. Learn to take the punches, deal with the bruises and keep on fighting. It just seems sometimes that it's not worth that extra uppercut without the guarantee that it will end the match.

But the fight, the struggle, the hope, it all ends eventually. Sometimes, the bad stuff is final. And as much as it hurts, as much as it stings and cuts you with every breath, at least when you know it's over, when there's no more swinging, you can finally rest and catch your breath. And eventually, you'll be able to pick yourself off the ground and figure out how to walk in this upside-down world.

between.lives

By the age of ten, we seem to really get a grasp of what's right and wrong. Of course, our parents attempt to teach us when we're toddlers: "Don't take the toy from him! That's not nice!", "Pee-pee in the toilet, honey", and well, we get it then, we do. And then, just about a year later, we test our boundaries... to find how exactly how wrong the wrong is, and how good the right is. We grow up and by about ten, we get it. We're not going to smoke, drink, or do drugs. We're waiting until we're married to have sex. And speaking of marriage, we can't wait to find "the one" and he will surely be Brad Pitt, or Will Smith, or something of the like. And divorce is out of the question. At ten, money does not buy happiness, and of course we believe in God, who doesn't? We're going to go to college and be something like a doctor or a business man, we're going to start our careers before we start our families. We have it all figured out.

And then we backtrack.
We decide to test our boundaries again. We think about smoking, drinking, and drugs. We crave for sex. We decide we want to be artists and debate the idea of college. We start to lose our religious faith and see where it gets us. We still know that everything we're doing isn't right, but we want to rebel. We have to try it anyway.

And then college hits, and we're toddlers again. Trying to figure out all over again what is right and what is wrong. We wonder like two-year-olds... well, WHY should we believe in God anyway? Why not drink, have sex, do drugs, smoke? You may have a baby before marriage, before your career and you wonder, what's up with the whole "normal" structure of life anyway?

And then, as sudden as a car crash, we're adults. Full-fledged, bill-paying, family-starting, working adults and we realize that nothing, nothing played out exactly as we had planned. We wake up one day and realize that we don't know who we are anymore. A sudden state of confusion: between loves, between careers, between homes, between cars, between religions, between ideals, between lives.

We're lost. Writings my way to try to clear the dust from the storm.