MOUNTAIN TOPS - WORTH VALLEYS?

"The soul that is always light hearted and cheerful misses the deepest things of life. Certainly that life has its reward but the depths of its satisfaction is very shallow. Its heart is dwarfed and its nature which has the potential of experiencing the highest heights and the deepest depths remains undeveloped. And the wick of its life burns quickly to the bottom without ever knowing the richness of profound joy."

Adding further weight to The Case For Friends Overseas Who Still Change Your Life From Afar, a favourite of mine messaged me that quote from oceans away at midnight last night. It was timely. (Which is apt, being that Aforementioned Friend has had perhaps more influence on my development as a person than nearly any other, er, ever.)

Digression. Basically, that quote got me thinking. Because those sentiments remain as relevant to the wider human struggle now as they were when originally spouted by L.B. Cowman in 1925. They reminded me of a mind game I played once last year. I vividly remember posing myself, for kicks, (a frequent, vaguely quirky pastime of mine) the following hypothetical question:

"Given the choice, would you rather live a life in the middle-ground; of 'safe'/'predictable'/'stable' + 'happy', where nothing hugely good nor hugely bad happens to you... or the alternative, a life of extreme highs and extreme lows, where you can only hope the former eventually makes the latter worth it?"

It's a question you wouldn't generally bother asking, because at the end of the day it's not like most of the above is anywhere within the scope of our control anyway. As much as the extreme-o planners amongst us (bless their cotton socks) find incredible comfort in forecasting, preempting and safety netting every aspect of their lives in an attempt to avoid the ultimately unforeseeable... that's just it. It's ultimately unforeseeable. ('Unforeseeable', by the by, is one of those words that looks more and more wrong the more you type it. I'm not going to use it again, we need a break.) 
MY POINT SLASH QUESTION is - were they right when they told us such platitudes as "it's better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all"? Does the good really negate the bad? Or would a 'safe' life, cushioned from those pesky incidents that implode the worlds of the best of us - with less downs but also less ups - be our choice, had we the power to choose it?

For the record - I decided I preferred a life of extremes. Of incredible joy, and conversely incredible sorrow, to that of living in the equivalent of the twilight of existence; never quite night nor day, just a bizarrely numb sort of half-life between the two.

Why did I settle on this bordering-sadistic option?

I suppose because I agree with L.B. Cowman - that "the wick of life (*when lived in the twilight zone) burns quickly to the bottom, without ever knowing the richness of profound joy."

I'm glad I asked it of me, as it gave me some comfort to realise that how life is naturally dealt to us anyway (ie, without our consent) is exactly how I'd swing it, even if I had a vote.

Without the downs, would we know the ups were up?

IMAGINE

DYING INSIDE?

It borders cliché, and is potentially also a vast understatement – but I’ve been learning of late that it’s so important to do what you love. Obvious, yes. Prioritised? No. I’m finding that oft’ the most seemingly simple things in life are the easiest to overlook. It’s not until you make an incidental change or addition that suddenly really impacts you that the penny drops, and you realise you've gone and accidentally changed your own life.

When I say 'doing what you love' I'm not necessarily speaking of 'doing' in just a career context, either. Recently I’ve found that a few relatively minute changes in my daily routine have had a massive impact on my general outlook on the world. Some of them have been small: the discovery of the perfect decaffeinated vanilla chai tea that I now drink every night religiously - it makes everything seem right with the universe. Some of them have seemed bigger: forcing myself to write. (Blog posts. Regularly. Ish.) But all of them have added greatly to my general happiness. Why is that? Well, because little things make you happy – ask any impulse shopper. Whether we mean to or not, we create the atmospheres of our worlds out of little, everyday things - events, interactions with others, quirky obsessions, interests, a new song on repeat, more caffeine. The 'everyday', and how we shape it, is of paramount importance. And the reality is that in the midst of the chaos, when the 'busy' card is too often played, the things we truly love doing are the first things to be squeezed out of the picture. In a classic case of the urgent versus the important - the urgent wins. And so life becomes a dizzying haze of urgent stuff, and less crafted intentionally to include the things that make us 'come alive'.

One of my favourite quotes talks about this. I will paste this quote at the end, in aid of being helpful. My challenge to me, to us, to everyone... and especially to those to whom life has lost its spark, is - what do you love? What makes you feel most yourself? Why are you not doing these things more? How could you find time to prioritise them? Slash, is it time for you to in fact discover what these things are? Ask yourself the seemingly obvious. You'll be better for it. And if you happen to find me in a park one day with Pride & Prejudice in one hand, a journal in the other, and a chai tea perched precariously in the midst of them when I should be doing laundry - you'll know why.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs – ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

HILARITY

"This week, the sixty-two million subjects of the United Kingdom will mark the marriage of His Royal Highness Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales, their future king, to Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, the captain of her high-school field-hockey team."

- Lauren Collins, The New Yorker

May 2, 2011