Hey world, time to live in what’s really happening in your life. Not what you wish was happening. Not what you hoped would happen. Not what used to be happening. But what’s actually happening.

Celebrate what’s actually there before you. Grieve the loss of what is truly gone. Don’t take out on others your disappointment about life plans that didn’t pan out—that’s selfish. Those plans aren’t coming back.

Those moments aren’t coming back.

Yesterday isn’t coming back.

What we had isn’t coming back.

Who we once were—is never, ever coming “back”.

The word BACK means “back” for a reason.

We go forward, and forge something new and more developed and more streamlined out of what we’ve become.

Or we drown in the directionless resentment of a lost yesterday.

New emotional, physical and spiritual territory can be scary. It’s easier to try and reach for our past personalities, because these are the crutches and the behaviors we remember. Our past personalities relied on certain variables to be in place, for those personalities to be able to function: love, connection, passion, rage, anger, confrontation.

All habits to feed chemicals in our head; chemicals we mistake for spiritual fulfillment.

Yet if we are bound by outside variables to feel “peaceful”, to feel “safe”—we’ll not achieve these things anyway, as they are stations of the individual spirit.

To truly release discomfort, pain—to truly grow, we must let go—let go of trying to “restore” what was, no matter how “good” we recall it to be.

If in letting go, our personalities suffer the perceived loss of something that once was critical to that personality, then so be it.

There is freedom in seeing life for what it is, instead of the continual “frosting the stale cake”, which in this day and age—is remarkably exhausting.

What was, is not what is now.

And “now” is created by tiny choices we’ve made in the past.

Does your present life rock? Does it kinda suck? Outside of variables you have no control over, how has your steering of your own life path created the atmosphere you dwell in, day to day?

Is your habit to be chronically miserable and angry and jaded? Is your habit to neurotically seek happiness and to toxically apply positivity everywhere, in spite of the situation or how others feel?

Pick an imbalance.

Have you buried your head in the sand and just hoped outside variables would change themselves? In doing so, have you co-created a situation that’s now difficult?

Or, have you made tiny changes that have lead to amazing results?

Perhaps you’ve done both. We’re a country that celebrates extremes.

Though we have no control over what comes to us in life, we do have control over how we process it (unless there are chemical challenges in the brain. Then we seek outside help.)

As the meme says, sometimes you have to let go of the picture of what you thought it would be like, and learn to find joy in the story you are actually living.

That joy may or may not be acknowledged by others around you. It may not even be able to be shared with those you love, who may not be in a space to receive joy. Yet it’s up to us, whether we decide that lack of being able to connect that joy to others around us is “lonely”.

This is something I work on everyday.

Do I need to be able to share joy, in order to feel it? In order to validate its existence?

Or is feeling joy within myself, that cannot be shared with anyone else—enough?

I struggle with the latter, greatly. Mostlikely because I was raised around a LOT of joy, that was shared. That, to me, feels connected, and is my baseline for “normal”.

I’m learning it is not normal to most people.

And as I age, and those around me age, I see joy replaced with anxiousness; I fall into this, myself, at times. Yet I see in my peers contentment replaced with bitterness, joy replaced with “what’s going wrong”, opportunity replaced with negativity about opportunity, hopeful new paths replaced by jaded views—its a pattern.

Negativity in the USA is chronic. It’s a habit. And I find myself feeling more and more lonely on this planet, for the lack of those who will get out of their own misery for one moment—to connect with another in joy.

It’s like I have this cable I keep trying to plug in, full of so much love and goodness — and it goes nowhere. But at the end of the day, why is it important to me that it goes somewhere?

Why, if I’m feeling it, is it so dang important to share it?

What is so important about the sharing?

Does it validate my existence? Does it give me a personal “high”? Is it the design of love and joy, to be shared? All of the above?

So I sit with the joy myself, losing the ability to feel that joy in the midst of great shifts, questioning why I even have it, as I’m stunned by the masses that simply won’t receive it, confused by my almost compulsive need to share something that so many JUST don’t want, or are unable to interpret.

It turns my thoughts back on myself: what is wrong with ME, when the rest of the world seems to be fine, phoning-in life, planning IRA’s, paying bills, barely connecting with others outside of some quick sex with a partner then back to binge-watching Ted Lasso, collecting “likes” and “follows” to validate some sort of connection on this earth.

Sharing emotionally with another takes EFFORT, something I’m seeing replaced by many (especially in my age group) with great selfishness, a woe-is-me anger, a new form of giving to the self, or self-indulgence.

Perhaps that’s why we choose misery—it keeps us seperate from everyone and everything.

Misery is the perfect passive-aggressive way to quiet-quit life.

This is clearly my own problem to work on, this conundrum once summed up by Dr. George Berkeley, an Anglican Bishop and philosopher in the 1600s, who said:

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Humanity hangs on this strange, lonely concept, subconsciously piqued by the thought of solitary demise. Yet most folks don’t know that Dr. Berkeley actually answered the great question himself.

According to George, the answer is that yes, the falling tree DID make a sound—because God heard it.

Good ol’ God, hanging around just out of this blast radius called human chaos.

So God must feel my joy. I just wish God could laugh, and share, and dork out, and snuggle up, and hang out and have cocktails.

Maybe God shares more than I’m able to feel down here on this rock, because I’m a resident of earth, the planet of chronic quiet-quitting life.

Clearly this is on me to figure out.

I’m personally looking forward to these six planetary retrogrades being over.