(originally published in print February 2024.)
#1. The only sensible thing to do is to love as much as possible, to fall in love at every opportunity, with silly things. Non-events like, the temperature of light, the colour of a leaf, the sidewalk, the sky. The what is not important, only the vertiginous line of the fall. Into it. Into everything.
#2. Read your way out. We are storytelling creatures after all. Stories can be quite useful, so can characters, archetypes, themes, memes, symbols, images. A Bible verse, a tarot card—what's the difference? Each one is an invitation into meaning as we see and understand it.
#3. Get rid of blame as soon as possible. It will not serve you except in that it will keep you tied to the thing—the cold, the dead event. Through the magic of your attention, it comes to life.
Blame seats us in the wrong question, as does deserve. Guilt and innocence are snares to limit our thinking, our understanding of events.
#4. Reject identifiers where possible. Identity defines, but also divides. Victim, survivor—these words aren't as effective as they claim to be. Life is not always definable by way of reduction. To the smallest essential fragment. The piece that, once understood, completes the picture, resolves the image, clear and faithful. No, there is so much that we don’t see, especially that we don’t see that we see through.1
#5. Avoid playing the game of power, especially other over others. Seek agency. Seek choice.
#6. I know I’ve said it a bunch, but love. Love is everything. Having it, accepting it, being in it, giving it.
#7. Accept the reality of pain and that things will change. The wheel moves ceaselessly in the round.
#8. Acknowledge your deep well of fortitude. Revel in your strength.
#9. Accept your inevitable death2, if you can. It makes living easier.
#10. Stop being so afraid of everyone.
“Hide the assumptions in the looker, and the looker will never find them.” David Bohm.
“Makin’ peace with my inevitable death.”—boygenius, Anti-Curse
