It’s gray and it’s rainy and there are a bunch of sirens, so it seems like the perfect day for some end-of-the-week introspection. Why not.
Twice over the last two days, I’ve seen a phrase I’ve never seen before. I mean I’ve seen variations, but oddly, this one, both times, from very different sources, were the same phrasing.
“If you’re alive, live.”
For the life of me (!) I don’t know what it means.
It feels, to me, like one of those phrases that appears, from the surface, to have great depth, but once you dive in, you find it’s one of those sidewalk chalk paintings. A great illusion, but no more than that.
If you are alive, you are, by definition, living. Not to get all pedantic, even though that’s pretty pedantic.
Sometimes I feel like there’s great pressure to make lives grand adventures, to get everything right, from work to friendships to romantic relationships to hobbies to the balance between the chores and the “fun,” whatever that fun may be.
Like there’s a magical formula and all points will be tallied at the end, plugged into one of those old computers that takes up an entire room, and with a reel-to-reel whine, ding! out pops the answer, whether you have “lived” enough.
Just another thing to get wrong, I think.
Maybe that’s because I assume my math isn’t mathing.
Here’s what phrases like that never tell you.
The bad parts are “living” too. The heartbreaks, the disappointments, the losses, the failures. The gloomy days, inside and out.
The fears, the anxieties, the weights you never knew you’d have to carry. Those are also living. Having those doesn’t mean you’re doing “living” wrong.
I hear a phrase like “if you’re alive, live,” and the guilt, the inadequacy immediately flood over me, as though I have let the universe down by not booking an immediate paragliding session. That there are mountains waiting for me to scale them, that I should be plotting my mission to Mars.
Though frankly, with that last one, I don’t know how long that “alive” part would last, especially if you’re counting on Elon, but, well, I know you know.
It’s OK if the “live” part is small, tiny, maybe imperceptible to the naked eye. Like this morning I added sugar and vanilla to my coffee, a flat white made with an electric frother.
I know, I know, I’m living far too fast.
Is that what it means? Is that what it can mean? See and accept the small joys in life?
So much pressure to get it all right, because we only get one take. But maybe we should take it back a step.
What is “right?”
Is there a “right?”
I guess that’s two steps, since I was already being pedantic.
Once again, I pose questions I can’t really answer, especially me over here with the kind of score the old-timey computer would spit back as an error.
Although as I’ve written this, the sky has cleared, so maybe there’s something to take from that.
So instead I will wish you a fabulous Friday and a wonderful weekend, and if you manage to crack the code, congratulations. And send me a cheat sheet.
A Bit to Read 
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