There are two social media events (well, let’s face it, there’s more than two) that irritate me to no end–your birthday on Facebook and New Year’s resolutions/reflections. I deactivated my Facebook this year on my birthday and guess what, practically none of my friends remembered, which is perfectly fine with me. Life is too busy to be remembering when everyone you’ve ever interacted with was born. That’s utterly ridiculous.
That brings us to the New Year’s resolutions. (rolling eyes like a jerk.)
Measurements of time are necessary in society so we can function, so we can schedule things and be sure other people understand when to be there. If you want people to show up to your birthday party, then it’s good for them to know the month, day, year and time. Time measures are all coordinates that bring us together for special events, mundane events and routine events, like going to work or leaving “on-time.” (I never do this, I arrive on my own time. Sorry I’m not sorry.)
Now imagine a world where there is no measure of time. Imagine having no alarm clocks to tell you when to wake up or how much time you have until you have to be at work. Take away the hours of your workday and imagine just getting there and then leaving at some undefined point. There are no longer any days, just the memory of how many times the sun has risen and fallen over the horizon to indicate another day has come and gone. At some point, you’d forget how many days have passed and eventually, the months won’t matter either. Birthdays would be gone and we would all simply exist as we are–without a numerical age lumping us into generically defined categories intended for people to draw easy conclusions about who we are based on an ingrained cultural bias set for the group: senior citizens, twenty-somethings, teenagers, college student, flower child or the nauseating and media-saturated ”millennial.’
What if your tombstone just said something like, “She Lived. She Died. She Loved Everything In Between.” No dates, just an acknowledgement of the existence of your beautiful life. If you strip away all of those labels you use to identify yourself and take away all of the things that are chewing up your time, (brace yourself, I’m going to make my point soon) what is it that you are left with? Do you even know who you are without the labels? Try to describe yourself to me without telling me how old you are (because of all things, this absolutely does not matter in the least, even though it is such a huge part of how we define ourselves and how we are defined by others) and also without using measures of time to describe anything in your life, past, present, or future.
You don’t need wait for December 31/January 1 to reflect on what went wrong and what is going wrong and tell me all the things you are vowing to do to change it. You can do it at any moment of your existence. And another thing, it appears to me that some people didn’t get the memo that life isn’t all rainbows and leprechauns doing cartwheels. It’s rough, and more often than you’d care for it to be. So if you are someone who only wants to accept the good things in life and then complain about every single bad thing (big or small,) then I’d venture to guess that you are fairly dissatisfied with your life, at least more often than not. No one has it all good or all bad, so please stop it with “this city is so meh” or “this scene is so blah” or “this job is so lame” and the reason for this blog, “this year has just sucked.” It’s fine to have a bad day or a bad year; hell, I had one of the simultaneously best and worst years of my life in 2015. And today has been an all-around shit fest as well, but I’m still happy as a dancing taco.
Take a look at whatever it is that you don’t like and take baby steps to change it or take one giant leap of faith and go in another direction if you’re feeling particularly bold. Start looking at your life from a place of abundance as opposed to scarcity–I promise you this, you will learn to live so much more soulfully and whole-heartedly that it will absolutely change your life.
Yea, that’s what I said, things will start to change–but not until you drop the woeful statuses and tweets and take control of the fact that you can’t control any of it. Because at the end of your life, all you have is what was in between the beginning and the end, so do what you want to do, and do it as immediately as possible. Because I think you’re swell kid, and I truly want you to be happy! (Stop reading…GO!)
