We Are All Just Walking Each Other Home

The clock is ticking.

Moments unfold, your tale told.

You: the tale teller.

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Post from 7 Days Ago: What Defines You?

Love the One You're With

I want to start off by saying that, when I post abstract questions about the meaning of life or make generalizations so broad that you could land an entire planet on them, I am not doing it because I think that I have figured out life. Even less so am I doing it to teach you something. First of all, I do not have life figured out. Even if I am right about something, it is a complete accident, and I didn't mean it. (Please forgive me.) Second of all, if you can learn anything from me, I believe you are smart enough to learn it without me masquerading as an authority. After all, Nature, my best teacher, never tries to teach me anything, and yet I learn so much every time I take a walk in the woods.

Now that I have removed any suspicion of my knowing something, I will tell you what I know. Today, in this fraction of time, I know what I have known several times in the past, and I know it strongly: I only have one life. That is the truth that vibrates under my skin today like a sweet, crunchy chord pulsed in heavy four-four time on a noble black Steinway.

Knowing the singleness of my life is overwhelming to me. It terrifies me. It makes me feel small. It amplifies the passage of every second into the crash of a wave of the great cosmic ocean. It is paralyzing. It is beautiful in a way that breaks my heart and inspires me to do great things, and, at the same time, it is humbling in a way that makes me content to do what I can. It is a cold, white, starlit knowledge projected on the asphalt of an empty street. It is the warm, black knowledge of the deepest caverns of the earth, which sing silent songs that echo for all time.

Knowing that there is one, and that there will always only be one, reminds me of something people say about relationships: "Love the one you're with." In the one life that I have, I come into contact with various people every day, in passing or with purpose. But the one person I never leave, my truest friend and my most toxic nemesis, is me. Only living one life means that I only get to be one person; I don't get a second chance if this one doesn't work out, or if I get tired of being me. I have to live with me forever, until I turn into dirt. I can't take a break, and I can't quit. And when I think about the fact of the oneness of my life, and I think about loving the one I'm with, I feel that the way I need to live my life is fairly clear to me. I need to take myself on, the good with all the bad, give myself a big hug, forgive me my sins, and love myself until the day I die.

Maybe I have figured out something about life. I don't know. I don't like to presume. If I do, it doesn't mean I know anything about your life, or about the way you should live your life. But while I don't know anything about your life, I do hope that it includes this message of love. Life is really too short to spend it giving yourself anything less.

Related: I do not believe in love.

The Reasoning Behind My Last 5 Posts

I would be lying to you if I said that there was a reason behind everything that I do. I believe I'm not unlike most animals on this planet: driven by unconscious impulse (no matter how reflective I might seem).

I won't get into consciousness here.

But for a good number of the things that I do, there's some underlying thought. And, however small the ratio of thoughtful to thoughtless may be, all of the past 5 blog posts managed to nestle themselves into it. Here's how they did it.

A Letter From the Universe to You

I wrote this letter on my phone while riding the 501 bus from the Financial District in Boston to my home. When I wrote it, I was missing the caffeine high that I had felt during the large part of the previous two days. In all honesty, I wanted to write something that would help me to get back into that bigger, calmer mindset that I tend to take on when I'm feeling on top of the world. If I could take myself to that calm at will, I thought, I would have achieved something highly valuable, maybe a habit I could practice for life.

Often, when I'm feeling sad or hopeless—which is not rare—I will do some positive self-talk. When I do this, I usually talk to myself in the voice of a loving mother or girlfriend (let's not get into how Freudian that is), and I start to tell myself any of the following things:

• It's OK to feel sad.
• I'm here for you.
• I think you did a great job.
• I'm proud of you.
• Just take a big, deep breath.
• I love you.

And that last one, for me, in my most depressed moments, is extremely helpful.

This letter, for me, was a form of positive self-talk. In my journey away from Christianity and through many forms of nihilism, positive self-talk has replaced God and prayer as a means to emotional calm and spiritual centering. Coupled with my belief that (1) there really is only one thing in the universe, and (2) we (who appear to be many different things and people), are all one thing—this letter was my way of talking myself out of a bad mood and reminding myself that there really is nothing to be afraid of in life.

Let me know if you found it helpful—or weird.

Memories from Childhood

I started writing this post just to write something. That might be obvious from the post's lack of structure, but I will admit that this post was just a straight shot from start to finish without any planning or editing.

That said, it developed an intention about halfway through: to tell stories from my childhood, and to reinforce a belief that the stories of my life (even the little ones about watermelon slush) are things that are worth telling. Whether that's true doesn't really matter to me, because the fact that a story is told means that it was worth telling on some level. And if it was worth telling for one person, that's good enough.

The only person who can decide whether your life was a story worth telling is you.

Love your story, embellish the hell out of it, and tell it like the epic it is.

I Can't Watch TV

After writing this post, I realized that it's not really true. That happens from time to time.

(Is anything I say on here true?)

What I don't watch on TV per se I watch in the form of YouTube videos, and the "precious time" I'm saving by avoiding the screen I'm spending (wisely or foolishly, I'm not sure) swiping on Tinder and scrolling through my Facebook feed.

There, that's my #confession for the day.

When I was writing this post, I think I was trying to preserve some sense of being a special snowflake or a reason why I'm different from everyone else my age. We all like to feel special, and I think my snowflake brain wrote this one. Since high school, I've given the snowflakey part of my brain a lot of say in what I say and do. (Whether that's healthy is something I'll figure out along the way, for sure.)

What you can't hear right now is the special snowflake in me squealing in discomfort. It has this small, squeaky voice like the mice from Babe, and it's desperately trying to take itself seriously right now.

It's really great. Wish you could be here to witness it.

Everything Happened Right

I used to feel this kind of ecstasy while worshiping the good lord Jesus Christ. For reasons that may or may not be obvious, I've stopped that sort of thing. However, the feeling of magnificent elation still comes and goes without calling itself the Holy Spirit. Now I feel it when I think of how all the tiny, tiny details of my life fit together in the present moment, and how, despite the moments of hopelessness and despair that have really dragged me down, I found a light at the end of the tunnel.

It's a far cry from Christian doctrine, but I can't help but wonder what Jesus meant when he said that he was the way, the truth, and the life. Which word was emphasized in that sentence?

Maybe it was the "I."

What if, for each of us, the conscious subjective experience—the "I"—is the way, the truth, and the life? What if the answers to all the questions we ever ask ourselves are inside us?

The point behind this post was to explain, in part, the feeling of relief that I feel after going through a long period of questioning and despair. It's to explain the peace that I've found knowing that the meaning of my life is my own creation and mine alone. It's to explain the relief of being free from the old constraints on the meaning of my life—the religiosity and the strict way of thinking of morality.

My Ass Glowing in Spandex, Plus Death

Being content to die is a virtue in my life. Not because life is bad or a burden or anything, but because death is one of the only two known points in our lives. The other point is right here, right now.

My thinking is, if you know where you are and you know where you're going, you can figure out the best route to travel. That route is your life philosophy. That's how simple philosophy is.

For me, I know where I'm going. I'm going to die. Some people are going to heaven to spend eternity with the good lord Jesus Christ, some people are going to the club later this Friday, some people are going to class in about an hour, but for me, it's clear that I'm going to die. (Actually, it's not 100% clear, but it's probably going to happen.) Because I know where I'm going, or I think I do, I can make informed decisions about how to spend my time while I'm alive.

When I wrote this post, I was celebrating one of those times when I felt like I was on the right path, and that, if I died in that moment, I would have felt like my life was complete. Whether other people would agree with that is beside the point.

To quote Roberta Sparrow,

Every living thing dies alone.

If you're going to die happy, you have to be happy being alone. And as I lay on the mat in my yoga class, sweaty and exhausted, I felt pretty happy.

This post

I really wanted to give a solid caption to that picture.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to breathe with me today.

A Letter From the Universe to You

Dear beloved,

I know I can be hard to see sometimes, but I want you to know that I am always here.

When you breathe your last, you and I will become one in a way you have never experienced before.

Shamunaia, ata mikauna.

Your body will decompose, and you, as you understand yourself, will end. You will die. And you will never taste breath again.

Shamunaia ata mikauna.

I will live on forever, and I will remember you. And I will turn your bones into roots and soil for the always turning tides. I will take your dust and create new life from it, just as I took dust to make you.

Shamunaia ata mikauna.

Do not be afraid of the end, beloved.

The end of your body and your awareness is necessary. Even your one life depends on the endings of millions of others.

Every life is built on death. And every death is built on life. From dust to dust, I create and destroy you.

But though you be dead and dissolved, you are not lost. You are not an absence. You are part of a great presence.

Because I am you.

And I will always be with you. Because I am always.

The Universe

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Learn more about the universe here.

Everything Happened Right

I look back on my 23 little years of existence on this planet, and I am utterly awestruck. Putting all the uncertainties and daily stresses aside, and all the hurt that comes and goes, and the unanswerable questions that I could wrestle with for the rest of my life...there's this core of light that remains. That core is the tiny tiny lightbulb of my awareness that for 23 years has told an evolving, changing story.

And it has been an amazing story.

I grew up in the Christian Church and loved Jesus from age 13 to age 20. During that time I lived the life of a teenage boy, complete with its hormonal ups and downs, social trial by fire, and all of its anxieties and depressions. I ran Cross Country, was a leader for my class, made friends, lost friends, and then, after what seemed like a lifetime, graduated, went to college, and entered the next unknown.

In college I stopped loving Jesus. Jesus became an obstacle between me and my true self, so I pushed him out of the way, made my way to the edge of the cliff of despair (High Horse Cliff), and jumped, hoping I would land somewhere on the soft, grassy knoll between Daoism, Humanism, and Nihilism---a space I, for lack of a better name, like to call Davidism.

(Read more about Davidism here.)

(Or here.)

(Or.... here.)

While I was falling from High Horse Cliff I saw all sorts of spirits. Some were terrible and told me that life was meaningless and that there was no point in going on. Some chastised me and told me I was bad and evil for pushing Jesus away, and they taunted me from a high cliff face to which I could never ascend. Some were kind, though, and said nothing. They held me in warm, soft hands and pulled me close, cooling the chill of the wind with the fire of their breath. When I did eventually land, I kissed each of these kind spirits goodbye, and I knelt down and pressed my hands into the dirt, warmed by the sun.

This is home, I said.

I've fallen in love with the air here. The earth is firm and forgiving and goes down and down onto an endless bedrock, and water gushes from the openings in its mantle. Cool streams flow into placid lakes, and I wander their edges and hold hands with the sun while it dances across the sky. From time to time the sounds of music touch my ears, and I'm reminded of the spirits who loved me while I floated down from "Heaven." Always I will remember how they breathed their love on me, and one day I will become a spirit, too, and breathe my love on someone as she falls from grace.