Nothing to do with anything but everything to do with everything.

There are those days where all of a sudden it’s 7 pm. You’ve lost track of time because you spent the majority of your day reading a really sad book that is also a little boring at times and so the breaks you take between chapters are a lot longer than they seem, or than you wanted them to be.  You feel pretty uncomfortable.  Not just because a character died in war and his family has no money and his sister is being forced to marry a man she doesn’t love or the whole town is all up in their business all the time, but also because you didn’t shower this morning.  It was a conscious choice at the time- which was fine given that you knew you were just going to read all day- but by 7 pm you have to remind yourself that you made a choice not to shower, and that you didn’t just forget.  Because there are days where you do just forget to shower.  Or forget to eat or flush the toilet or feed the fish or whatever other thing that is normally, well, normal.  You spend a lot of time contemplating some really sad things- like how small you are in the grand scheme of the whole universe, and how all you’ve contributed today is a decreased consumption of water- at the sake of your hygiene.  You have lots of great ideas though, and in your head you have these really beautiful, articulate and important ways of writing and expressing them but 99% of the time they just stay in your head and never get written down, because the couch is too comfortable or because you’re too tired or because you’re just an intellectual jerk.  Or sometimes you’re afraid of where they’ll take you if you start getting them out of your head.  Or all of those things.  Or none.  It depends on the day, on the instance.  It’s never the same.    

You’re so smart.  And you know that not only because you’ve always gotten good grades or because people have always told you that, though those things help, but you know it because you know that you’re thinking things so many people never contemplate.  You think about your place in the world, your place in the lives of your friends and family and enemies and acquaintances, you think about what you learn in school outside of school, you always have.  You apply it.  YOU are the real life example of the smartass who asked “When am I going to use this in real life?”.  THIS IS REAL LIFE.  USING YOUR BRAIN IS REAL LIFE. YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT, LIKE, ALL THE TIME. FOREVER.  And you hope so badly that the aforementioned smartass kid is no longer a smartass, and that he learned something at some point, and started using his brain in the way it was intended to be used.  Hopefully he’ll have realized that they don’t teach you history to bore you, but they teach it so that you’ll  be prepared for when it repeats itself, all of a sudden becoming painfully relevant to your present.   The aforementioned smartass will realize that they make you read Romeo and Juliet because one day you’ll fall in love; they make you read The Scarlet Letter because you need to learn what it means to be societally exiled, either so you yourself, should you find yourself there, know how to deal with it, or so that you can recognize the injustice when it happens to someone else.  They make you read books where people die because as you get older a lot of people who have always been in your life are going to die, in a number of ways.  They make you read books about war because those aren’t going away any time soon.  And then they make you read Brighton Beach Memoirs or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or something else that’s funny because it’s necessary to learn the importance of laughter, especially with all that other sad stuff they make you study.  They teach you math and science and physics that seem useless at the time but one day you’ll be driving a car and you’ll accelerate and you’ll be like OH MY GOD THIS IS MATH IN REAL LIFE.  Even all the math and science you’ll never understand, that really hard stuff, even if you personally never use it, it’s present all around you because, the physical world and how it works.  Which is pretty damn important, given that it’s where we all live.  And there are people, a lot of people, who DO understand all that hard math and science and they use it all the time to figure out the world, with the intention of bettering it.  And even if all this didn’t matter,  even if we lived in some odd universe where things just WERE, for no reason at all, they’d still teach all this because WE SHOULD HAVE SOME CULTURE.  What the hell else would people talk about otherwise?  Really stupid things.  Like, objectively and undeniably stupid.  That’s what.  And you, a smart person, and your fellow smart people, are just trying to go through this journey that is life doing the best you can.  And you’re really hard on yourself.  You always think you’re not doing enough, and that whatever you are doing you aren’t doing well, and even though you might lose sleep over it, it’s a good thing to think, because it means you’re thinking.  And if you’re thinking, well, that means a lot of really great stuff.  (THIS IS WHY THEY TEACH YOU PHILOSOPHY).     

It’s okay if your thoughts, when you finally go to write them down, don’t seem to be linear.  Other than actual, physical, literal lines you draw on paper or paint on a road, or a football field, not very many things are linear.  Time I guess, though a bunch of people out there will debate that.   The point is, is that nothing is ever too big of a stretch because everything in your life, LITERALLY EVERYTHING, is related to at least one other thing, though usually very many other things, to the point where you probably couldn’t even wrap your head around it.  But sometimes you will get it.   Sometimes you’ll realize that laziness, and all that’s negative about it, is one of the recurring themes of the book you’re reading, and then you get up to take a break from reading, thinking you’ll get a drink of water and check your email, and then there you are all of a sudden writing something.  Today you wrote something down.

Tomorrow is another day.  You can’t know if you’ll write something or not.  That can’t be forced, no matter how great the ideas in your head are.  Tomorrow, though, you’ll be a better person, even if for only for yourself, for having written.  For having shared.   Because even if nobody else reads what you wrote, by writing you inherently shared those words with some other part of yourself that wasn’t involved.  Because you are complex.  You are made of parts.  Parts that make up one really awesome whole.   Which means you are, just by existing, a reflection of the world.  You are part of this really big web, a web full of other people and words and ideas and foods and things and places, a web which a lot of people like to refer to as the entire universe.  Which is scary, and sometimes sad, but also really great.  And beautiful.   So tomorrow, just try to relax.  Think your thoughts as they come, and act on them as feels right.  You should also take a shower.