This is real life and real life isn't always pretty. It's not always fun. You can laugh when it's appropriate and smile when you mean it but that doesn't mean there isn't heartbreak and tribulation in the midst of it all. This is real life, in the real world, and at all times we're surrounded by real people with real problems and real feelings with which to either magnify or minimize those problems. Because, at the end of the day, we all struggle. Some of us laugh a little louder; some of us hide it a little better; some of us can push away the negativity for just a little longer and bask in the sunshine instead. But no matter where you fall on the spectrum of human adaptability, of human PERSISTENCE and WILLINGNESS TO ENDURE, you're not immune to fear or pride or worry or failed expectations or disillusionment or any of the other storms that we sometimes get caught in. Life happens to even the most prepared. It happens to the prettiest. To the smartest. To the bravest. And one of the things we have to accept about life is that sometimes we won't get our happily-ever-after. Maybe our prince is more frog than blue-blooded royalty; maybe the only castle we'll ever call ours is the one we build in the sky; maybe we'd like to be the princess but in reality we have more in common with the ugly stepsister or the lonely spinster or the young maiden who Prince Edward WOULD have fancied if he hadn't fallen for Sleeping Beauty instead. And maybe we WILL get our own perfect version of happily-ever-after. Except it's not as black-and-white as the fairy tales would have you believe: because there are two sides to every coin. When you're on a winning streak you don't remember that your success comes at the expense of someone else...for every win, someone must lose. Can you be happy if it means you're making someone else miserable? Can you dance with the prince at the ball and rule over a kingdom from your castle balcony if it means YOUR dreams came true but someone else's were shattered? Like I said, this is real life and real life never promised it'd be fair. And the ones navigating the sometimes-calm, sometimes-turbulent waters of Real Life are Real People: fallible, imperfect, messy, exalting goodness but prone to depravity, selfish and self-interested and self-indulgent. We might be the hero in our own story but someone else might cast us as the villain in theirs--and in reality we're neither; in reality we're both. Protagonist and antagonist; friend and foe; beauty and beast. And sometimes our kingdom by the Sea becomes a sepulcher; a prison we suddenly find ourselves bound by, with a steel-grey ocean crashing violently against the walls we erected to protect ourselves; sometimes we think we see clearly but then wake up one day and realize our view was distorted, like looking in a fun-house mirror--the veil has been lifted and we don't like what we see when we look at ourselves or the life we've so carefully built for ourselves and our loved ones. This happens because Real Life isn't static. It ebbs and flows and carries with it our hopes, our illusions, our Big Dreams and Plan A's and Future Successes. We can swim with the tide or we can swim against it; neither is more "right" than the other but it all depends on our destination.
All of us look out at the horizon at some point and see the big WHAT-COULD-BE: what we could be, what our lives could be, what HUMAN EXISTENCE could be if only we all somehow realized that there's no loss greater or more tragic than the loss of our humanity. But then again, it's easy to compromise. It's easy to trade compassion for comfort; love for lust; generosity for greed and community for selfish gain. Easy and oh-so encouraged by a world that's becoming smaller and yet far lonelier, far more isolated and individualistic. That's the goal sometimes, isn't it? To build our own legacy, complete with palaces and courtiers and flashy balls--the people we have to step on along the way notwithstanding. We'll be the princess in this story even if we have to crown OURSELVES! And if Prince Charming isn't quite up to par then we'll trade him in for a newer, younger, shinier model. This is, after all, Real Life, and Real Life is cut-throat so we might as well take a page from its book and adopt the same kind of attitude.
But life is more than survival. It's more than the daily grind that leaves us empty and exhausted and YEARNING for that elusive "something-more" we get glimpses of when we look out at the sky at night; it's more than being the belle of the ball or catching the cute prince's eye or ruling a kingdom with an iron fist. We might never know what happily-ever-after looks like or tastes like or feels like but that's okay because we'll know something deeper, something more innate and yet more universal, something we all have a right to no matter what our condition in life or who other people think we are. We'll know what it means to LIVE. To BE ALIVE. To have our heart broken and cry until we're sated; to love someone just because; to throw in all our chips even when the odds are heavily stacked against us; to give more than we should and laugh more than we should and hope against all hope that we'll be loved more than we should. It'll never, ever be perfect. There WILL be perfect moments, times of divinity and holiness and transcendent beauty, but they won't last. The moment will fade, tomorrow will come, and our ugliness and the world's ugliness will be thrown in our face in even more minute detail. But at the end of the day, if we live a life that is genuine, a life that is accepted and fully lived in the calm and in the storm, we don't need Perfection. We don't need happily-ever-after. Instead, we need precisely WHATEVER life throws at us, because the only foundation that can truly anchor us to our humanity is experience. So Live. =)
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