“I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.”
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
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- how long did it take you and Sobia to clean the house?
- hmmm not too long
- about 2 hours?
- yeah about there
- mmm cause that's how long I was gone
- why? feeling guilty?
- nah i was just thinking I should go to the gym more often
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“When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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real life is in the conversations you have in the kitchen, while washing the dishes. it's with the acquaintances you bump into in the hallway. it's in how you spend your free time. it's in the uncomfortable pause. it's in the supermarket checkout line. it's what happens while waiting for the bus, on the way to work. real life isn't what you see on the big screen. real life is behind the scenes. it's all the hours of tedium and difficult, unglamorous work.1 2 the parts of the Rocky montage that got left on the cutting room floor. the moments that nobody ever gets to see. it rarely comes prettily packaged as some great escape or adventure. it's not always the handsome prince. some monumental set piece lying in wait just around the corner. real life isn't a highlight reel. it's not a string of spectacular events and beautiful memories played back to back, one perfectly timed freeze-frame high-five after another. that's not what you should be aiming for at all.
the moments that truly matter are not always grand. life is something you create with the little moments, and it's dangerous to forget that. It's dangerous because if you keep expecting or looking for life to be what the movies and television advertisements keep trying to convince us is special or important, you'll end up on your deathbed never having actually lived. if you keep insisting that your life should look or happen to you a certain way, you're going to miss it. you're going to miss it completely.
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in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.
- 1 Thessalonians 5:18
1. “True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.” - David Foster Wallace, The Pale King ↩
2. "And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in, day out” really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration." - David Foster Wallace, This is Water ↩
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