I continue to come back around to the thought that the biggest most important thing is maybe accepting and embracing and welcoming the vast and raw expanse of human experience and emotion. The agony and suffering and joy and ecstasy and delirium and boredom and despair and hilarity and playfulness and rage and lust and care and tenderness and curiosity and confusion and determination and hate and desire and contentedness and just fucking all of it.

You can’t have one without the other and we’re all one big messy bunch of people and it all gets stirred together into a messy beautiful soup. My heart soars and aches at the knowledge that there are people right right this second experiencing the worst moment of their entire lives – utter and complete despair and wrecked-ness – and other people experiencing absolute peak joy and fulfillment. It’s all happening, all the time, so much of it. Over and over and over and over.

I sometimes feel like I have to be careful with this thought, not to dwell on it or meditate on it or focus on it or whatever on it too much or too long because when I do I can drive myself into a weird state of both joy and terror, happiness and brokenness, optimism and despair. To imagine the full breadth of human experience all at once in one container is powerful and moving and horrendously overwhelming and and and

And I said you can’t have one without the other, but I do think suffering and pain can be reduced (though not eliminated), and that would not diminish joy and pleasure and good things. So I guess you can, in an isolated way or place or time have one without the other, though I guess when I think of reducing suffering and pain I mean things like war and violence and addiction and etc. But I don’t know that you can reduce the suffering and pain of heartache and lost love and death and misunderstandings and potential unfulfilled. I don’t know! Maybe you can, and we should strive for those things. Probably! Probably in the striving we love and hold each other, in ways that are urgently and deeply needed.