This comes form the Run Wild Creative archive, an email newsletter from way back when.
Hello my dear,
I hope you are well and rested, or passionate and tired. Regardless, I hope you're doing what you want. It's a Saturday morning over here, I tried to stay in bed for as long as possible and am just about to finish my breakfast, put on some sunscreen and head outside.
I've been thinking alot about the length and width of a life. If I was to only rely on lifespan statistics for my gender and residence, I'm about here on my lifespan
Where are you? How does that make you feel?
There's an assumption I had that my life would look something like this
But instead, what I'm finding is that life's trends are more like this
Sometimes it feels like I'm taking a loop backwards, other times it feels like a huge step forward that I never thought was possible.
As soothing as a single upward trend seems, you hardly see it in nature. On this earth, things are seasonal, and sometimes brutal. It can't be summer forever just like you can't be happy and kicking goals forever, and that's ok.
The answer to "Hey, how are you?" should be more nuanced than "Good" or "Awesome". In order for your mood to be "awesome", you have to have a baseline of "Just ok". If you were awesome all of the time, it would be the new ok. Do you get what I'm saying? With killer songs about living your best life, please remember that it's also to be just ok. It's fantastic in its own way, it makes the really good moments taste sweeter.
There's no expectation that life will be fantastic all the time, and nor should there be. All in all, being a human in this time period, on this planet, is wonderful. You can feel the grass between your toes (or the wind on your face for all you Northern hemisphere folk). You can experience an orgasm as pleasurable (not many animals do, we're quite lucky). You have access to shelter, a variety of clothes, a blue sky and a new day on this rollercoaster of an existence.
How bloody exciting.
I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. - Diane Ackerman
Lots of love,
Tash