life is weird when you don't know what you're doing

when we're younger there are so many things we know but don't understand yet.

(one way to describe the experience of life is the journey to understand things we know, in my experience.)

when we're in high school and college we "don't understand," (and by understand I mean "grasp the totality of it all") but it doesn't matter because there is structure around us. in school there are classes. phases. progressions. numbers on our door. these seemingly small things keep us in a cocoon of structure that is like, in some ways, living in fantasy or a version of reality that we're capable of being in at the time.

and then we graduate college and the first year after that is pretty chill because we're just out of college and figuring it out and that's kinda fine.

and then for some us, it dawns on us that we're humans standing on a planet that's spinning around the sun which itself is hurtling through the universe and no one knows what's happening or going to happen and yet adults just go about their days. they think this is normal. this is the world we've been living in all this time? we finally realize.

a world as pretend as the one we graduated from but where the stakes are more serious.

and that's when it starts to sink in, and this is where life starts to get harder (and better in some ways, but also harder). this is where it can also get kinda scary.

we are "adults" now.

we do our best to create the structure for ourselves we had in school in our adult lives.

we come up with ideas and plans. we develop this idea of a career. our biology calls us to form relationships and maybe even families (of blood and choice). we wake up and do and do, and the years go by, some of which we remember quite well. others get strung together and almost get forgotten completely.

and then we're 40, and we already have a lifetime of memories as we sit at the kitchen table and try to remember them all.

but what have we done?

have we been living in reality? or just part of a fantasy like structure?

we realize so many things over the course of this long but quick life.

one of the biggest things we realize is that to a degree we always live in a fantasy. a slice of reality is all we can take sometimes it seems.

consider one of the greatest fantasy of all: the fantasy of falling in love.

movies encourage us to "find the one." and we search and we look and we grapple with being single. (and like while all that is happening part of us feel like like is on pause but no that is life, what we're doing?). and then we do fall in love. for a time. and maybe we stay in love. or maybe we fall out of love. or maybe we fight to stay in love.

but the myth is that love was ever scarce.

all that time we spent searching for the "one" when it wasn't that we couldn't "find the one" out there in the world or struggled to. it was that we couldn't find that person inside ourselves and so we couldn't bring them out into the relationships we wanted to find them in.

this is one of the biggest secrets in life that we learn. everything is everywhere all the time. whether we perceive it to be or not depends on whether we're ready for it. and all of the scarcity in the world only really exists in our hearts. when we learn to love, to see, we see things everywhere.

i can't believe it took me this long.

to push out of the fantasy and into something larger. always.