We all have our own ideas about beauty and sadness. For my part, I don’t struggle with depression. And so, I can dabble in the sadder regions of beauty without feeling personally affected. I love life, and I am resigned to the darker aspects of contrast, the negative against which the positive is valued. Nothing true bothers me much, though I am distressed by lies passed off as truth. Anything true, however, can be appreciated and understood in light of everything else. There is, I believe, no imperative toward balance. There is no grand design. There is no karma. Everything could tilt off the axis at any moment and spill forever into oblivion. If it does, that will be alright. I just feel privileged to have lived so many years during the beautiful time, when everything spun in relative stability, when the sun peeked over the horizon every day, when the atmosphere was always there to fill your lungs. I feel privileged to wake up still next to my wife after almost twenty years now. There are no guarantees, and I think we’re all doing pretty well considering that. Yesterday she told me she had a renewed belief in the afterlife. She said she believed we got to see each other again. Then she started to cry and had to stop talking about it so she wouldn’t ruin her makeup before we got to the restaurant. She didn’t ask me what I believe, because she already knows and we don’t need to talk about it. I believe in life before death. I believe in sitting across the booth from her and enjoying a meal. I believe in each of us believing what we need to believe. There is no grand design. That’s the real genius of it all.
Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.
Later. Love.
