The feeling of what happens

03Jul11

Someone is gone.

This person was just a few years older than me, and he wasn’t a very very close friend, but there was something about him that had a strong impact on me. His death a few weeks ago has had even stronger an effect, to the point that I almost can’t fully understand how much it has unsettled me.

Around this time last year, my life was undergoing a radical shift (that I chose to make, that I wanted, that I knew I needed). I was beginning to learn how to live for myself, to do what I wanted for me, to let go of the things I tried to do for other people that kept me small and afraid. This person was, at the same time, leaving to a country across the ocean from his home and family and everything that was comfortable about his life. I remember sitting across a table from him one afternoon, eating and laughing, and thinking to myself that he was probably a lot like me—scared of things being different, scared of things being something beyond what he could handle, but even more scared of things staying the same, so he was readying himself for a huge leap that would change his life. In my own process at the time, I felt so much terror and excitement about the newness ahead of me that I knew I would face. Thinking about up and moving to another country to create a whole new life was amazing, inspiring, but too much, too scary, too overwhelming. I thought, “how can he do that? He must have something in him that I don’t have in me.”

He went for it, and from all that I heard, he found expansive joy and purpose in creating that life for himself. I have taken my own steps toward creating something like the fearless life, too, and today I am an entirely new person for it. But I still struggle at times with the thought that I’m not strong enough yet to handle this thing or that thing—that something might still be too challenging or too far beyond my capacity.

He died suddenly, and was barely past 30. There is no way to understand or make sense of it. There is no way to placate, or to explain how a young, happy, strong, vibrantly alive person can just disappear like a speck of sand in the wind. There is no way for his family and friends to say, “well, ok, he lived a good life and now he has died.”

I’ve felt angry a lot. Angry that things are unfair for people who try so fucking hard to have happiness and love and a little bit of peace. Angry that this person had the most precious thing taken from him, and that his family had had something so precious stolen from them too. Angry that Charles Koch and Muammar Gaddafi and Snooki and Catholic priests who rape children are all alive and walking around on this planet, but that a good person was taken away in the height of happiness and contributing to others and creating good. At his funeral, the priest talked about how it’s not the length of your book that’s important, it’s what happens in the book. I stared out the window of the chapel, looking out at the city still shrouded in its sleepy early morning clouds, and thinking that his life was this never-to-be-finished novella that started with quiet, then became a journey of someone fighting against the ugliness of the existing world, and trying so fiercely to generate some beauty, and then the story just ended abruptly and nonsensically.

I think this is what we are all trying very hard to do, trying to fight back against the inevitable and incomprehensible. And I think we probably all tend to think at one time or another, “this might be too hard” or “this might be too scary,” so we hesitate and wait for a better time when we are more prepared. But what if there just isn’t a “better time” for anything? What if the best time is right now, while you’re feeling it in your heart and bones? What if you are never going to be more ready or less scared? What if the best time is whenever you choose it to be?

This thing, death, makes no emotional sense. But it is the single most powerful thing that reminds us to live as much as we can, because this one precious life is what we have. So what I can take away from any painful loss, and what I can pass along from my heart to whatever tiny fraction of the world is willing to listen to me, is don’t wait. Don’t wait to do something that has a chance to make you brilliantly happy, or to make someone else brilliantly happy. Don’t wait to do something that scares you. Don’t wait. The perfect time isn’t going to come, because there’s no perfect time. The perfect time is whenever you do it. So don’t wait. Don’t wait to take the leap. Don’t wait to go to Spain or Japan. Don’t wait to take a new job that makes you feel more valued. Don’t wait to tell someone you want to be with them forever. The truth is that the only thing you have to lose is the chance to do it some other time. Don’t wait.

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Filed under: general rambling and so forth   |  2 Comments
Tags: death, fear, happiness, life, meaning, psychology