32 years of Just trying everyday
I woke up to a day filled with so many surprise calls and messages and lots and lots of food. I was really touched by the outpouring . Not just because it's January and people are just trying to make it till pay day. No, because I genuinely do find the effort people put in just to make me feel like I matter to them powerful.
It's very easy for us to be disillusioned. It's almost a mark of intelligence now to be cynical and removed. To observe the world with a bemused indifference. How else can you see all the shit around you and NOT say "Well we're all fucked" and simply laugh and drink and be merry . Others just don't see the point and resign themselves to that sweet spot between actually giving a fuck and
It gives you a great vantage point from which to see the ultimate meaninglessness in efforts. Mammals on a floating rock hurtling through space hoping that our lives will echo into eternity. That our hopes and dreams will objectively matter simply because we want them to. And I believe that's true. So many billions of people have lived. They had hopes . They created things they thought would last forever. But got swept aside with the changing sands of time. Their lives don't matter to most of us at all. Hardly even to their descendants.
Rather than depress me, all this oddly comforts me. Partly because my fuckups, the times I made a fool of myself-like when I called my boss"Gundi" in conversation or in S1 when asked if I knew Jermaine Dupri and I said, "I've heard her music", or hurt someone won't last forever either.
Mostly this means that every moment is finite. It's here and gone forever . Our lives are mist. Technically meaningless and yet we cry out for meaning. The absurd ,as Camus called it ,demands that we must face this grim truth and yet still be defiant. To spend our days pursuing the things that matter t us and to those care for . To make someone else's pursuit of happiness easier.
So as the messages came in, the calls, the food..oh bless the food..What I was most moved by was the people who I have had the benefit of being around, of loving and them loving me back and seeing in them this spark. This defiance. The will to live and thrive...not just get by.
I see it in Bartholomew* who turned down the relatively safer and parental approved path of civil engineering to run his own studio and give young people a chance to live their lives purposefully, I see it in Jerusha* who still believes in love and education and trying new things and is planning n making an exodus to a new land to realize those dreams; it's evident in Farouk*, who labors all day at his work but supports his wife later as she does her business and actively taking care of her , cooking for her and the baby allowing her to rest; in Aphra* who constantly criticized, and yet has nothing but love to give and encouraging to everyone around her.
It's in a man who chose to fight for his blood than to join the crowd of absentee fathers, in Bathsheba* who decided to spend her days empowering women to feel safer, fitter and more equipped to occupy a world to often set up for them to be treated as objects than as people.
*****These are real names. I mean it. I wouldn't do something as pointless as putting old Jewish and Biblical names in place of people's real names. C'mon.
Some people have role models in the images of the famous and the powerful , symbols of hope they may never meet . Who can in essence remain pristine. That's fine but I find that those I know, whose foibles I'm familiar with, whom I have heard speak harshly or fail miserably , are the people I'm most inspired by. The people who greet this world with a sincere, almost insane optimism that somehow they can make their dreams reality. That they can carve joy at of the avalanche of shit on their door.
So as I turn this very unremarkable age, I'm inspired by the people in my life that give a shit..That put in the effort. And I am going to continue to do the hard job of trying to be better, of improving. Not for some grad everlasting reason, because , well, what better way to spend the few moments we have on this mortal coil?
Thank you to all the people that inspire me....I'll always say, you guys are an embarrassment of riches I call friends.
P.s. And just a dash of encouragement from a baboon that jogs , like many of the images in this entry, from my favorite TV show at the moment ,Bojack Horseman. Check it out if you haven't
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