Find Something You Love Doing And Do That Thing
Our lives are, with the risk of appearing resoundingly cliche, roller coasters. Only we enjoy the highs more than we are terrified of them, and the lows are less like almost hitting the bottom as they are getting to the top and realizing your seat buckle has come off, and there are no tracks beneath you to keep you on board. The point I’m trying to make is…
We don’t always know what’s coming.
But what that means is we all find something to make things better when we can’t handle it anymore. For some, that’s a friend, sleeping (or trying to at least), or perhaps indulgence to food, video games or your lover. But at one point you’ll have to realize, maybe they won’t always be there at that moment in time, or maybe that habit is just too destructive to do when things get bad, especially when they stay that way for too long.
We all deal with pain in different ways.
Just as pain deals with us in all different ways, we need to have one thing that’s constant. In the moments when you’ve never felt more alive, in the moments you wish you almost weren’t, we need to be able to find something to let it all out. And after religion and God, that is love. We need something we love doing that makes us forget about all the bad, remember all the good, and express whatever it is we feel in that moment. When I was in high school, that was parkour. I knew that if I was ever feeling bad, and there was no one around, I could walk outside my door, to my own lawn, and do tricks that expressed exactly how I felt inside. If I was angry, I could try the same difficult flip over and over again until I conquered it. If I was pondering something or needed to relax, I could flow up every stump, wall and obstacle, and in a sense become a part of the world, flowing over all that is made. If I was happy, chances are I would land everything, and when I didn’t, I would just laugh and laugh, because it was all okay.
After parkour came music, but...
The reason those things were so powerful is because they let us express ourselves in a filterless way, that doesn’t hurt anyone, and that we can share with others when we are happy or sad. The reason we need those things is so no bad moment is ever bad enough, so no good moment can ever be lost, and so people know we are stronger.
If you want to live life in a way where the little things don’t hurt and the big things don’t make you get off the roller coaster, find something you love.
If I left this life without doing something I love, I lived life wrong. And when living, there is no such thing as a smooth roller coaster.
