Life

You know, there are certain songs that you just love even if you don't really know what the lyrics are saying. It's a combination of the tune and the strange words. One of my new favorites is Wind by Akeboshi. The chorus says:

"Don't try to live so wise.

Don't cry 'cause you're so right.

Don't dry with fakes or fears,

'Cause you will hate yourself in the end."

Now those lyrics don't exactly make sense one line at a time but all together, they kinda make up my motto and how I live life. I tend to hide my feelings from people, or at least those feelings that I don't like: fear, sorrow, worry. But if I'm happy or even angry, I have no problem showing it. But still, I'm afraid for people to see the true me. And yet, I'm still almost as readable as an open book if people just take the time to open their eyes and look. I've locked myself up and rarely let anyone have the true key. But there are always those who can pick the lock. And against them, I have no defense. But I'm not as closed as I used to be. I have opened up and returned to my real self. I've been able to find true friends again and recognize the friends I already had but never really took true notice of before. Life is a funny thing. It all comes back around again. And recently, I've been remember a lot what Sarah Kay said in her poem If I Should Have a Daughter:

"No matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal.

Believe me, I've tried."

I've done that so many times: tried to heal the pain of myself and others. You can't handle everything on your own. People are there to help you. It took me a while to figure that out, but I did. Another part of the poem says:

"I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots near by, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix.

Okay, there's a few heartbreaks chocolate can't fix.

But that's what the rain boots are for.

Because rain will wash away everything if, you let it."

Rain and tears. They roll down your face and disappear into your clothes and into the ground only to dry up and take your sorrows with them. Because:

"There'll be days like this.

There'll be days like this my mama said.

When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of a phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you will be up to your knees in disappointment.

And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you. 

Because there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away.

You will put the win in win some, lose some.

You will put the star in starting over, and over.

And no matter how many times land mines erupt in a minute, make sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life."

Who could put it more eloquently? No matter how many time things go wrong in a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, lifetime, life is still beautiful and no one should ever forget it or stop remind others of it. But still, remember:

"Always apologize when you've done something wrong.

But don't ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.

You're voice is small, but don't ever stop singing.

And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat,"

You throw it right back at them and show them the way you see the world: with beauty and light and love. It's taken me a long time to figure all this out, but life is beautiful no matter the ugliness you see. The fact that you are alive is something to be grateful for in and of itself. Nothing can change that fact and don't let anyone tell you otherwise because if you do, you would have given in to the sorrow and loneliness of fear and anger. And with fear and anger, all the beauty leaves until your world becomes filled with grey. Believe me, I know. And there is nothing harder than trying to color a world filled with negative light. It took a punch in the face and a kick to the gut and getting the wind knocked out of me by the grey life I used to live for for me to finally understand  that this world is filled to the breaking point with happiness and beauty. It seems like a weird way to learn something but that's the way life was for me. It took that much pain and anguish for me to see the beauty of life.

And therein lies the unpredictablility of life. You will be surprised by what can make you change. Some things would seem to cause more harm than good but they do exactly the opposite. Things always happen for a reason no matter how random or reason-less they seem at the time. That's the way life is. It is never the same from day to day and you can never expect to experience the same thing as someone else because you are not them no matter how much you might want to be. And yet:

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

 Robert Frost is a geneous. It's also how i try to live my life because the road less traveled is more often than not the harder and yet better/right-er thing to do. His poem is entitled "The Road Not Taken" as a rememberence, if you will, to the other road, the one he didn't take. Isn't that the way life goes? It's full of forks in the road and you always choose one but rarely, if ever, do you come back and start walking down the other road.