other lives
the constant battle of living life on a human scale
other lives
As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.
(Everything Everywhere All At Once)
It’s hard when you are in one place and you want to be in another. It’s hard and it’s the human condition. It’s hard when other people get what you want and you see only glimpses and you feel jealous and angry and like they don’t deserve it or they’ve forgotten you or forgotten what it feels like, how bad it feels, to be where you are. And sometime
... See moreIf grief is love with nowhere to go, I am full of it. Still, I am not sure I want to have a child. My downfall is that I want to live all lives in one, and soon I have to choose one.
via METAXU
“An ability to tolerate the anxiety generated by ambiguity is what allows us to respect, engage, and grow from our repeated, daily encounters with the essential mysteries of life. But the payoff goes even further. Certainty begets stagnation, but ambiguity pulls us deeper into life. Unchallenged conviction begets rigidity, which begets regression;
... See moreDreamy But Disconnected
open.substack.com
There are the different versions of ourselves, the different lives we have lived, and perhaps even more dangerous, the ones we could have lived. The ones we feel bittersweet over having not pursued, the ones we could see ourselves in, if only just a few choices had been made differently. We wonder where the assorted paths would have led, dream about the hypothetical different realities other than our current one. For me, it’s not so much FOMO as it is feeling like there’s another version of myself out there which I may have abandoned.
Of course it’s a luxury to feel this way, to be able to choose where you live, what jobs you take. But there’s also something to feeling pulled to different realities, to feeling in-between. If you don’t tend to those sides of yourself, they easily feel like they’re disintegrating—firm ground eroding beneath your feet.