other lives

the constant battle of living life on a human scale

In Youth, you watched this and felt hundreds of feelings, imagined hundreds of futures. Swimming within you were all the serial killer stories you’d one day write, that would be turned into movies just like this, and orbiting just outside the atmosphere of your comprehension (but still in view) were all the unknowable details of the grown-up world

If 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

Dreamy 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.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

Sylvia Plath

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

The fact that we are alive in this moment, out of all the moments that have ever existed, entitles us with a certain awe and obligation. As I commit to keeping going, I am saying that I don’t know how my future self will feel, and I owe it to that person to wait and see.

via Carissa Potter

You could theoretically change your life at any moment. Move here, date that person, work on that startup, write that blog, dye your hair, adopt a dog. Should I stay, should I go? I don’t know if this agency is freedom or burden. Perhaps all the best things are both.

Nix twitter.com

“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;