| And now it's time to look back and forward at the same time. See, in my first column here I told you all to slow down and take a look at life. In my second one, though, I suggested we all speed up and do everything we can to live life to the fullest.
Well, not everyone swallowed that mixture whole and happily. Joe, for example, is a great guy. He's a decent, friendly sort, and the husband of a friend of mine. Not that Joe isn't a friend as well, I just know his wife better. Regardless, he stopped me and slugged me in the shoulder one night, over a beer.
"Man, what the fuck? You have the balls to tell me to crawl over here and jump over there and act like the other doesn't even exist?" Joe has a way with words. What he really said was "You're contradicting yourself. Explain." My way sounds better.
He's right though. I did do that. Knowingly. I raised my glass to him, drank a hearty swallow of Bass, and nodded.
"Joe, Joe, Joe. You got me," I told him as I set my glass back down on the bar. "You got me fair and square. Except."
"Except," Joe asked, eyeing me over his scotch.
"Except that was gonna be the third column. And now I'm gonna end up wasting time with this conversation, just to show how smart you are, but also to highlight the fact that these columns are more than just words on an electronic page somewhere."
"Then what are they, showoff?" Joe didn't enjoy being part of my grand demonstration.
"They're life. Writ small, but still large enough to use the word ‘writ’ unironically." I set my empty on the bar and caught the bartender's eye. She came over and snatched the glass away to refill it.
Now Joe? Joe went home to his wife and kids and will probably never drink with me again. Either way I feel better about it. Someone was watching where I stepped and called me on bullshit they thought they could see clearly. And if I hadn't already had this planned it would've been bullshit.
You have no idea how much I treasure that.
I treasure it more with beer.
Still, the trick is, in answer to Joe's point, to do both. You can't slowly mince through your whole life, and you can't rush to the finish line without stopping once in a while to make sure you remember what you're fighting for. There's a balance to all things. The way to find that balance?
Try it and see. Make a mistake; cause a small wreck. Then pick it all back up and put it together and go on with life. It can't always be as bad the next time around as it was this time. On the off chance that it is worse and getting bleaker by the second, remember that no matter how dark life gets, it can be laughed at and you'll pull through.
I should write for mother fuckin' Hallmark.
Look out your window for a second. See that world out there? You can try and hide from it, but it'll still get you and try its best to drag you down and kick you while you're bleeding on the pavement, just to watch the pretty lights flicker in the red pools.
When they kick at your front door / How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head / Or on the trigger of your gun?
When the law break in / How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement / Or waiting on death row?
Yeah, The Clash knew it all back when. You have to choose how you're going to live your life. It isn't constant, it isn't one or the other, but you will still have to make those choices.
The choices are the key, realistically. We wait for a big moment to come so that we can prove what we believe in, but those big moments hardly ever happen. It's the small, subtle moments, the ones we toss off because we want the big picture; those are the ones that define us. The thousands of moments of our every day pile up in a tally of our times. Each tick of the clock adds to the tock before it. Soon we're drowning in the problems we created for ourselves while we waited for the larger problems that we can't even see.
This is why I do this. To shut out the voices. To stop the screaming. I used to think it was coming from the outside, you know? So I closed some windows and locked a few doors, but it just got louder. I added some boxes to muffle the sound, sealed up the windows, and almost went deaf. So I clawed my way out into the open and started talking back to the voices until they gave up and went home a while. It's a method. It works for now.
Mostly.
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