the gray stuff
You know what's scary. Knowing every thing you do every day, except for hugging and kissing loved ones, is completely extraneous. But yet, when those loved ones decide it's fun and games to throw fully loaded dinner plates around the kitchen, you instead send them into solitary. It's like, in order to live your values you have to not live your values. You know what I mean.
It's a perfect night for TV. Good thing it's still around. Only one more week. My man Chris is gone. Jack who knows how long he can keep it going, more a fan of Karen at the moment.
One thing that has grated on me every time I hear it is "live every moment like it's your last." I never figured it out until recently. The way it grates is simple: if every moment is your last, then everything in the world, every observable and reaction-worthy event, is either a non-issue or the most important thing ever. Flavor of tic-tac? Non-issue. Text of an e-mail? Mission critical. People? Sorted into two groups, no room for middle ground. Living like every moment is your last is not living at all. The middle ground is where life is, the gray stuff, neither good nor bad, black nor white. Otherwise the film is already written, acted, and edited.
That's why I can rally the troops and send these precious plate throwers on a time out. I would love nothing more than to smooch their little cheeks and cuddle in front of a book. The timeout is a drop of black paint in the bucket of white... vividly gray, accurately gray, undeniably alive.
So don't go and tell me to live every moment like it's my last. Save that desperation for the movie you want to write. I'm taking the gray stuff on, with all the complications and the contradictions. I'm rejecting the drama and merely living. I hope that's OK.