Here’s the thing: being a human is hard. It’s hard to get out of bed sometimes. It’s hard to wear decent clothes Mondays and Fridays. It’s hard to smile at people when you’re definitely not smiling on the inside. It’s hard to hold a million things inside your small little being.
It’s hard to be on the top of the world one moment, and at the bottom of its lowest pit the next. When at our best, we secretly worry about what could go wrong and fear the worst so that it becomes almost inevitable. When at our lowest, we look back on the happy moments and wonder what happened, how you possibly ended up here, why you let yourself screw up.
Life is not simple, as much as we’d like to convince ourselves that it is. Life is complicated: a tangled, intricate mass of an unfathomable number of moments and feelings and memories wound together messily, as though it was a pair of earbuds left in the bottom of a backpack for too long- seemingly impossible to undo.
And life cannot be undone. That is what we, as humans, struggle so desperately with. Inside of each of us is longing to figure everything out how to successfully navigate through the years and the trials, but we simply cannot understand the paradox that life is. We have to trek on and hope that the wind is at our backs, that for every uphill, there is a down.
Because of this, we must lift one another up along this journey. We must be kind and sympathetic to those that are struggling, and joyful and excited with those that aren’t. Sometimes we need to be congratulated for just getting out of bed in the morning. Give hugs as much as smiles–abundantly. Realize that people should not be enemies, but rather, allies against a common obstacle. Forgive quickly, and don’t be so hard on yourself. You will mess up. You will make mistakes. And that’s okay.
We are here to learn, to live, to experience life at the fullest capacity. So many things in this world have the capacity to drag you down, but I encourage you to fight on, to stand tall, and face the great paradox of life with joy and excitement, not dread. Simplify your life; you already have a million things going on inside of you, so eliminate the things that bring you down on the outside. Minimalize and organize the hectic parts that make you freak out so that you can gather yourself to face the larger, more important things.
Most of all, surround yourself with love and happiness, in whatever form that may be. People, art, nature, music, sports, poetry… add more of that in wherever you’re able. Those are the things in life that you can control, so utilize that for your own benefit. Don’t make life harder than it already is. Take the reins, and LIVE. Focus on making yourself better, and then making others better. Stop worrying about things that don’t matter, and learn to be spontaneous and free. It’s better that way, I promise.
