Sublime

“If you don’t believe in an afterlife, then you [should realize] that this is such a short and precious life, it is really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There is no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or however long the universe is going to be around.”

They might not amount to much, but they are personal lessons I’ve learned through actually putting my own body in motion, and thereby discovering that suffering is optional. They may not be lessons you can generalize, but that’s because what’s presented here is me, the kind of person I am.

Living is (in most cases) a tiresome, lackadaisical, protracted battle. If you don’t make the effort to persist in pushing the body forward, then keeping a firm, positive hold over your will and soul becomes, in my opinion, realistically next to impossible.

To be clear, no amount of time can make my life long enough. Leading a life is not a project that can be completed but rather a purposive activity that must be sustained. The judgment that my life is too short is constitutive of leading a life, which requires that I postpone the death I bear within myself.

This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn’t my own invention.