The pain of the present

The pain of the present is this question & this knowing:

Is this all there is?

Is this really life? I think to myself as I drag the bottom edges of my coffee cup in a circular motion on my desk. This?

Yes.

My dog lifts his head to look at me, bored. Something he so innately knows, seems a little too foreign for me to fully grasp.

You see, I think we’ve sold ourselves a story that life is not this:

staring at the walls, avoiding todo lists, making eye contact with our pets, avoiding eye contact with strangers, vacuuming the floors, paying our bills, & folding our laundry, cooking our meals & waiting in line (so many lines) feeling irritable, bickering with a family member rushing to the next thing

Because this can’t be it. Because, life is for LIVING.

Living (n)—the state of being after we have solved all of the problems and completed the full checklist of the things that need to be done.

Except, the checklist never ends. Some problems are not meant to be solved. And, life is not something that we get to indulge in once the todo list is finished.

It’s right now—smack in the middle of all the things that we don’t desire to do.

And because it’s right now, life is not going to begin when we quit our job, meet some arbitrary money goal, get married or have children, have a midlife crisis, buy that car, move to the beach, go on that vacation, or have the perfect amount of things organized in the perfect kind of way.

Life doesn’t start when we stop doing the things we hate (or merely dislike), or when we only do the things we enjoy. It doesn’t pause when we ‘get it wrong’ or need to reorient ourselves to ‘getting it right’.

There is no pause button for life.

PSA: LIFE IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

There are no steps to complete before you are allowed to live. There are no steps to complete before you are allowed to live in joy. There are no steps to complete before you are allowed to enjoy the life that you are living, right now.