The Question
Have you ever heard the quote, "Life is a comedy?"
How about, "Life is a tragedy?"
I used to love Ani Difrano... before she got so consumed with George Bush that I just couldn't take it anymore. In one of her songs she puts it artfully,
"and we lie in our beds, and our graves
unable to save ourselves
from the quaint tragedies we invent- and undo,
from the stupid circumstances we slalom through"
Some days we are the world. Our sadness is the world's sadness, and we can't understand that while we crumble from pain the rest of the world goes on. While someone loses a friend or a mother, another spends $500 on a pair of heels... another finds out he or she has cancer, another gets a promotion, another is looking for meaning and lost, another is finding Jesus, another is born again, another celebrates.
Some days things seem small and the universe is vast. And we look up at the stars and we just see blackblackblack and twinkling, and we know that our job is small, our love life is small, our hobbies are nothing, our country, our war, our people, and our planet is nothing but another pulsating speck in an ocean. If you looked out closely and carefully, you couldn't even distinguish between our colors and our lights. Sometimes that is terrifying, sometimes it makes us feel inevitably bound to one another and comforted.
Suffering and happiness are such small things, but it's everything. When job stress is compared to life and death, does it mean anything? And if not, then why do we punish ourselves?
I don't think that life is a game of winners and losers, but I'd still like to be prepared. Artists waffle about this question constantly. Stevie Nicks asks,
"Can the child within my heart rise above,
Can I sail thru the changing ocean tides,
Can I handle the seasons of my life?"
Everything I thought that would be difficult about being older turns out to not actually be one of the nagging, multifaceted questions that I'm not sure if I'll ever answer. I don't think about them every day, but some days I wake up and the question explodes; five fingers across my cheek just to make sure that I know. The stinging says, "I'm still here, bitch."
How about, "Life is a tragedy?"
I used to love Ani Difrano... before she got so consumed with George Bush that I just couldn't take it anymore. In one of her songs she puts it artfully,
"and we lie in our beds, and our graves
unable to save ourselves
from the quaint tragedies we invent- and undo,
from the stupid circumstances we slalom through"
Some days we are the world. Our sadness is the world's sadness, and we can't understand that while we crumble from pain the rest of the world goes on. While someone loses a friend or a mother, another spends $500 on a pair of heels... another finds out he or she has cancer, another gets a promotion, another is looking for meaning and lost, another is finding Jesus, another is born again, another celebrates.
Some days things seem small and the universe is vast. And we look up at the stars and we just see blackblackblack and twinkling, and we know that our job is small, our love life is small, our hobbies are nothing, our country, our war, our people, and our planet is nothing but another pulsating speck in an ocean. If you looked out closely and carefully, you couldn't even distinguish between our colors and our lights. Sometimes that is terrifying, sometimes it makes us feel inevitably bound to one another and comforted.
Suffering and happiness are such small things, but it's everything. When job stress is compared to life and death, does it mean anything? And if not, then why do we punish ourselves?
I don't think that life is a game of winners and losers, but I'd still like to be prepared. Artists waffle about this question constantly. Stevie Nicks asks,
"Can the child within my heart rise above,
Can I sail thru the changing ocean tides,
Can I handle the seasons of my life?"
Everything I thought that would be difficult about being older turns out to not actually be one of the nagging, multifaceted questions that I'm not sure if I'll ever answer. I don't think about them every day, but some days I wake up and the question explodes; five fingers across my cheek just to make sure that I know. The stinging says, "I'm still here, bitch."
1 Comments:
I feel like this a lot of the time. It goes back and forth.
And...Same with The Daily Show. I had to stop watching for a wee bit as it got a bit much to take.
I had to go back, though. I can't JUST watch FOX (My husband's die-hard favorite.)
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