A Good Ride
*This post is inspired by the School of Life.*
You Seem Angry
You know love is like an ocean. Wait, that’s a horrible analogy. You know, my mind does that. It just spits out words, while I’m taking a shower or doing laundry. And, it’s often pseudo-sentimental-ambient-corniness makes me want to punch myself — using some sort of fist-sized wormhole that allows me to use all my force and…
But like, here’s what I kind of mean.
I was thinking of adolescents (13–20), how they lash out against their parents. I really like the way that School of Life video described it. We do it, knowing that our parents love us. We flail in the ocean, knowing that the water is just going to go back to the way it was.
And, the kids that don’t. They’re afraid that their parent’s love may be compromised by their actions — as if parental love is conditional. That’s even more goddamn sad. Not that you should lash out against your parents, but it’s somewhat of a sign of a healthy relationship.
Because loves consists of trust and forgiveness.
I think I wrote this somewhere, definitely a bunch of times, scattered among digital stars. (Ahem, google docs.)
Trust that the people you love will never hurt you.
Forgiveness when people inevitably do.
Secretly Urgent
Also, another thing. I feel like love should be secretly urgent. If you really love someone, you should show it either by action or through words. I’m being hypocritical here, but that’s what we should do. I’ve been…trying.
Because it’s somewhat urgent, right? Any person you talk to, there are millions and millions, if not billions, of chemical reactions happening in their cells. The rods and cones in their retinas are sucking up photons. ATP is being shifted around, and DNA is replicating and repairing at incredible speed. He or she — is dying.
We don’t get to stay here forever. The neurons that make up our memories will decompose and scatter as atoms, finding itself back in the earth, the sky, the sea, even space. But, don’t get depressed! I’d be amazed, instead.
The fact that our bodies exist the way we are. It’s — interstellar. Listen, the oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous in our bodies literally came from the stars.
Other than hydrogen, all the other elements in our body were formed by supernova, the phenomenon of an exploding star, producing more than 100 billion degrees. It’s an understatement to say that this explosion is massive; it’s brighter than most galaxies through Hubble and Webb telescopes. Now, these are just the atoms that make up our bodies.
How they came together to make me. How they allowed me to gain intelligence. How they allowed me to meet you. Do you see it now?
Every human being is comprised of stars.
We’ve won the greatest lottery, folks. Look around you, we might as well be magical rainbow-unicorns.
And with the time that we have, we should love one another.
We should be urgent about it because we are astronomically valuable. We should be secret about it because we don’t have to remind each other that the world is ending — by saying that we need to save it.
Just love, right? For the light in our eyes, the fault in our stars.
Dissonant Harmony
I don’t know where it came from, maybe it was when I was doing laundry. But, another quote came to me, one that I ended up putting in my first novel:
Harmony has no sin.
You know, music is really — weird. It’s really just cherry-picked chaos that our brains seem to enjoy. It’s true that we can somewhat quantify the orderliness of music (e.g. harmonic frequencies) but what is considered orderly is completely subjective. Even across cultures, we have different scales and modes (though the western 12-note scale has become predominant).
But, the principle of harmony. It doesn’t make sense; but at the same time, we know that it’s incorruptible. There’s no scientific explanation for why we love it other than the fact that it may massage our brains in a certain way.
It’s like — love.
Out of the chaos, out of the infinite permutations of different frequencies that our ears can process, limitless like the stars that spot the universe, we have evolved to recognize harmony. We just know when we hear it. And, it brings us together.
I just imagine the African plains, music over a calm breeze. A group of hunters raise their heads above the grass to find something near the sunset horizon. A relaxing image, I’d say.
And, I don’t know if it’s because I grew up around a lot of girls when I was young, but I love rom-coms. I just do. I just feel really happy when people find each other.
Because when they do, it’s like hearing a chord on a Yamaha. It might have some complex dissonance like a jazz chord, but it’s still harmony.
The Hate We Have
Anyway, I’m starting to lose focus as always. Back to the reason, I posted this thing in the first place.
I wanted to write for and about adolescents, maybe also for a younger version of me in some distant, parallel universe. I just want to tell a lot of kids that it’s going to be okay — even as they start to realize the world isn’t what they’ve been told.
But more specifically (and I know that this is getting a little meta-cognitive), I want them to know that it’s okay to hate yourself. There’s a strange cycle where teens find reasons for hating themselves and then hate themselves even more for hating themselves.
It’s kind of stupid. Well, it is stupid. Stupid, but formative.
It’s after being lost that you really appreciate being found. It’s after hating yourself that you really appreciate being loved. Perhaps, it was evolutionary to experiencing this seemingly-universal angst.
But once found, it’ll be — superstellar. (Yes, I really just made that word up).
At this point, the probability of things happening is so infinitesimal that we just throw it out the window. We just experience and live, something greater than exploding stars.
Of course, we’ll continue to struggle. Our foolish hearts.
But, if we just remembered that we once held hands with rainbow-unicorns.
At the end of the day, we’ll say:
It’s been a good ride.
