*Typing*

Try to feel every day: the good days, the bad days, the beautiful and the ugly. Feel them all. Feel them completely.

When it rains, do not run. Let the cold cut you to the bone. Trudge home a beautiful, pitiful disaster. Wear your wet clothes like a basset hound wears its ears.

Not because you're a glutton for punishment but because you're a believer that in order to be present in the joy you must be present in the pain; that in order to be present by the fire you must be present in the rain.

You will eventually get back home. Know this. Believe this. Cling to this like a child clings to its mother's hand.

When you arrive, close the heavy door behind you. Strip away your clothes. Let them fall in a wet heap at your feet. Strike the match. Light the bunched up newspaper hugged between the dead, dry wood.

Wring out your hands against the flame. Feel the warmth walk along the lines in your hands, circle your wrists, climb up your arms, rest at your shoulder blades and then fall down your chest and your back and your legs and your feet––until the warmth replaces the cold.

Time moves slower in grief.

It's a molly hangover on a Sunday afternoon. It's emotional motion sickness. It's your heart pleading for the chance to vomit all over your chest. It's you fantasizing over the moment you can finally get the fuck out of the car.

How much longer? Three more hours.

How much longer? Three more hours.

How much longer? Three more hours.

It's the feeling you had as a kid when the snow starts to thaw and you try to ignore the grassy patches bleeding through. It's a lump in your throat you can't swallow as you make angels out of what was.

It's nostalgia for a place you can't return to. It's the episode in The Office when Michael leaves. It's homesickness for a home that burned down.

It's a concussion. You can't think. You can't see. You can't hear. You stare at people's lips and try to make out what they're saying but the words land on you like rain on a window pane. It's you watching the tears roll down in wet ribbons as the hot air from your lungs paint shapes on the glass.

It's you reminding yourself to breath.

I know this wonderful little boy who is obsessed with rocks.

He has hundreds of them; all in different colors, shapes and textures. He can name an unbelievable number of them and when you ask which is his favorite, he never picks up the same rock.

When he runs errands with his mother, he wants to take all of his rocks with him. He picks up as many as he can. They soon fall from his hands onto the floor. He attempts to save his fallen rocks but more rocks fall in their place.

Eventually, his mother gives him a cup and says, "Fill the cup with the rocks you want to bring––then we must go." Watching him attempt to choose from his sea of rocks is like watching a tiny philosopher contemplate the meaning of life.

I tend to collect worries like this kid collects rocks. I soon find myself with too many to carry and I become a disheveled mess as I drop them all over the floor of my mind. I become overwhelmed. I shut down. I can't hear or speak because I'm so busy warring with my worries.

I have this angel of a therapist who gently helps me sort out my life with mental frameworks. When she sees me staring off into the top right-hand corner of her office, overwhelmed with my worries she will tell me to close my eyes and reach for my cup.

She will say, "Fill the cup with what's worrying you most––then we must let go."

Reassurance is a nice-to-have but it certainly can't be a requirement, especially when striving to do original work.  

Originality doesn't come with a sherpa nor a well-traveled path up the mountain. That's not part of the deal. You are the sherpa. And, it's your responsibility to get your ass up the mountain and back down again in one piece.

Reassurance is only available when you're doing something that has already been done before. Originality requires something else entirely. Originality requires conviction. Not so much conviction that the original work you are after will succeed––more times than not, it won't––but conviction that you're on the right path because it's your path.

The Bhagavad Gita sums up this relationship between conviction and originality beautifully, "It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow someone else's perfectly."

With time, you realize stories are the only truth and reality is make-believe. You realize you can tell yourself any story you want and it will be true.

You can tell yourself the story that you should be further along than you are, that your best years are behind you, that you can't outrun your past, that you don't have what it takes, that you're undeserving, that you're a fuck-up, that you're broken, that no matter how hard you try nothing seems to work.

Or, you can tell yourself the story that you are exactly where you need to be even if it's not immediately clear, that the best is yet to come, that your past is a memory but no longer a reality, that you're more powerful than you think you are, that you deserve good things to happen to you, that you're learning from your mistakes, that you're imperfect but far from broken, that you're finding joy in the process and letting go of the outcome.

If either story will be true, which story do you choose?