Take one minute to lay out the current details of your life – the deepest, darkest, innermost passions and fears and regrets – the quiet struggles and lessons you’re fighting tooth and nail to learn and re-learn – the loves that lift you up and fill your heart with immeasurable lightness, and the shadows of loves that haunt you at 3 a.m., weigh you down, and twist your insides when you hear a certain name or pick up an object you keep meaning to put away. Imagine all the complex and intertwining narratives in your life.
Now, think of everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever known, and every person you see on a daily basis that you don’t know. Consider that each of those faces has an equally chaotic and confusing christmas-lights-tangle of plots and subplots and B-stories that keep them awake at night, that cause them to zone out in the shower, that keep them checking facebook pages they swore they wouldn’t, that cause them to play certain songs on repeat until tears well up in a desperate struggle for catharsis.
We’re all battle-weary soldiers in the war of existence, bravely lifting our heads out of the trenches, despite the danger of simply being, just to feel the warmth of the sun on our faces. Human life may be objective, but feeling… feeling is absolutely subjective. Knowing this, how could you ever not love, pity, empathize with, or at the very least share a knowing nod with every other sentient being on the planet? We’re all scared, subjectively. We all hurt, subjectively. We all feel lost and confused, subjectively, and we all search for the bright points of light that remind us why life is worth living at all.
The last thing you want, or need, in life is someone overtly making it harder for you, or worse yet, trying to end yours – so why would you ever EVER want to be that stumbling block in anyone else’s experience?
The only thing we have is each other. Look around at every person around you, no matter how clueless they seem – no matter how vehemently you disagree with them – no matter how poorly they may treat you out of ignorance – and recognize that person as your sibling – your unwilling copilot on this giant organic spaceship hurtling through the vast and terrifying emptiness of the unknown.
We’re all in this together, people. Let’s start acting like it. It doesn’t start with “him” or “her” or “them” or anyone else. It doesn’t start after the war, or after the election, or even tomorrow.
It’s starts with you, right now.
