This is how you do life,

You cry until you don’t anymore,

You carry the weight of your fallen body on tired shoulders and knees whose skin is broken and bleeding and you crawl until your legs have regained their strength and are able to carry you and then you walk,

You cradle your broken heart in the crook of your cupped palms and nurse it until it is back to a manageable shape and then you allow it to be bathed in the warmth of a love you know might either hurt you again or lift you up into the heavens and hold you up there till every slight that love has ever committed against you take on an acceptable hue, until you can look at all that pain and say, if only in a tentative whisper that, “Yes, love is worth it!”

This is how we live the best possible life,

We sit in a tub full of scented water that soothes with its warmth and the way it titillates the senses,

Or we curl up in a ball on the bare floor of an unfurnished and unpainted room tired from our daily toil and cry into the floor, sowing all our collected hurt into mother earth’s belly in the hopes that her power of creation will turn our pain into joy and put it back out into the world and brighten it if not for us at least for some distant stranger’s soul.

We do the best we can and hope for the best, and when the best comes we hope for better and when better comes we look into the future and crave eternity,

Yearning is not a dagger that pierce the heart and leave bleeding gore if we are able to see and enjoy the present.

What we don’t do is deny that we are human, and we are here, and the world for all its beauty is imperfect much like ourselves,

What we don’t do is plant our pain in the ground upon which we walk collecting varied experiences that can both soothe and bruise us, and then wish that pain back into the world because God forbid we suffer alone,

There is darkness in the world, and light in boundless abandon, we do life best when we accept this reality and make of it what we will.

This, my friends, reflecting beauty in a world that gives one beauty and ugliness in near-equal measure, is how one does life.

It is liberating.