Know who you are. Introspection. Self-examination. Know your real thoughts, question all of your motives, understand what makes you happy and what hurts your heart. Learn your weaknesses and your strengths– and whether you want to do anything with them or not. Know what you need from the world and what you have to offer the world. Once you know yourself, don’t compromise yourself. Then everything else will fall into place.

Life is good. Maybe not my life, specifically. Maybe not according to our definition of “good”– that which always brings pleasure, that which goes the way we think it ought to go, that which brings us only happiness– maybe nothing in my personal life is good, or happy, or going the way I want it to go. But LIFE is good. To be alive. To experience. To know beauty and pain. Life is most good when you know who you are. From that starting point, you can truly experience every aspect of it to the best of your unique ability; from love to heartache to beauty and ugliness, every experience will be a reflection of who you are. This makes reality (Life) personable and unique. Even your pain. Even my pain. And that’s such. a. good. thing.

Death isn’t “bad”. It’s an inevitable experience of Life; and remember, Life is good. We’re afraid of death, you know. It’s the termination of what we want – although sometimes, it’s the end of what we don’t want, as well. But Death is not something to be feared, in and of itself. I don’t actually think we fear Death itself, rather the effect it has upon our Life. It’s one of those [Life] experiences we don’t want, because it ends what we know. Case in point: I’ve been known and loved twice in my Life, once by my mother (as most of us are), and once by a peer (an enigma– it’s natural for biology to love its own, but it’s almost a miracle for peer to know peer and truly fall in/choose to love). Both relationships died, physically. The first relationship was my Stability. Her death was cancer, 11 months of suffering and fear with no one to blame. It took 6 years to mostly recover, and part of that recovery involved the love of the second relationship. That second relationship was my Heart. His death was needless, senseless, and someone else is to blame. I don’t know what the future holds, except this one sure thing: my death will eventually follow. And you know what? That’s ok. What I had with both relationships made me who I am. Future relationships will make me who I will be. Experience upon experience. Life. And all I can say to that is, live in such a way so that when Life’s inevitable experience of Death arrives, you’ll never wish you had loved less, only more.

I don’t know why. I spend most of my waking hours trying to figure out, “why?” and I think that’s a decent way to spend my time. I used to believe I could figure it out. Often I will speak as though I do know why. I may be right, I may be wrong, but in all my searching and efforts, I still do not know. why.

We always look for ways to judge others. “We” does not equal “I” in this sentence, although “I” am included in “we”. This is a universal condition: the need to judge others, for reasons x, y, and z. I’ll never forget growing up in a house of faith, where there was anger and bitterness and fury at family members who believed one doctrine over another. Predestination vs. Free Will. GOD FORBID. Politics– our 2-party system is more than a mess, it’s a natural development of human nature to control and rule all opposing views. Personal judgements can start with something as [ugly] small as gossip. “So and so did this… can you believe it? Oh my gawd. What horrible people. I’m so glad I’M not like that.” Judge. Judge. Judge. And to the extent that we judge is the extent that we reveal our utter ignorance and foolishness as a species. Can anyone else know you except yourself? Who can judge your heart, your motives? No one. Might they be right in their analysis? YES. We all might actually be right in our judgement; but tread softly in saying we know it, because we don’t. To assume, when we 1) don’t know the thoughts, motives, and hearts in question, 2) don’t know the entirety of any given situation, 3) have “smaller” or “bigger” versions in our own life of the very thing we intend to judge, is something that makes me tremble. And I am guilty. My greatest hope is that in experiencing this thing called Life, my judgement lessens and my compassion grows. Perhaps… perhaps that is the point of all this pain.

“To love our enemy is impossible. The moment we understand our enemy, we feel compassion towards him/her, and he/she is no longer our enemy.”

- Thich Nhat Hanh

Truth sets you free. When I came to understand this, I felt liberated; it was like a burden that I never knew I had just fell away. It takes guts to be honest, and I’m not talking half-ass honesty. I’m talking brutal, laundry-aired honesty, the way that Life really works. When you acknowledge what is REAL — what is actually raw TRUTH, in your experience — there is nothing that can defeat you. What this requires is a willingness to take responsibility for everything you experience in life. Most people cannot stand to be held responsible for their own lives, much less for the consequences of a Truth they cannot control. We lie and manipulate and deceive, to get what we want. And in the end, we usually find we can never actually get what we want through a facade. That’s all it ends up being: a facade. Pretense. It’s a shell of reality, instead of Reality itself. Facing Truth (first in your own hearts and then in the situations you experience) will give you the most freedom, because Truth IS REALITY. And no one can make Reality, not real. You know exactly what you’re working with… you don’t have to “create” anything or pretend anything. Truth sets you free. Face it head on & be free.

We don’t have “time”– time has us. My mom used to tell me, “Meg, time is on your side.” She meant that I never had to make decisions for myself under the pressure of time; she meant I could wait things out, test, analyze, test again. She meant, “Don’t make any decisions you cannot stand behind. Don’t do something for which you are unwilling to be held responsible. Don’t let anything external pressure you to do what you are not comfortable with.” This was a lesson I learned the hard way, as my horrible experience of a ‘marriage’ will attest. Time is on my side, so long as I’m using it to truly take responsibility for what I choose in my Life. If I die while “waiting” for time, and the reason I’m waiting is because I didn’t have enough time to make the best decision, then I have not lost. But there is a flip side to that, and the flip side is far more prevalent than using time to make wise decisions. Most of us squander time. We take it for granted. We think we have “time” to do this or that, time to say this or that, time to put our priorities on a lower list of “to-do’s” than they should be. We do all of this, subconsciously knowing that our greatest fear– Death– is the most inevitable thing we will ever know. And we still waste time!

We don’t have time, time has US. Get a’movin’. LIVE, damn it.