All the Times

When was the last time you cried?

Have you blocked it out? Have you never? Or at least it’s nothing you’d admit to?

However, can you recall the last time you smiled? When you laughed last?

I think to some extent we all hope and pray for a life less ordinary, not thinking as we do that less ordinary may not always be positive. We crave action, adventure, love, lust, passion, fame, fortune…All the while thinking that when we get them it will ultimately lead to satisfaction, the satiating of some primal thirst, our idea of happiness.

After some thought, I think that this might be a misguided way to demand drama, to call for misfortune. The most troubling piece of the human condition is its addiction to fickleness. We are junkies for stimulation and agitation. We are quick to leave what’s comfortable and content for the mere empty promise of a thrill. When that thrill fails us, we are then left cowering with regret.

Again, when was the last time you cried?

Was it because of someone else? Perhaps it was. Even so, it likely in no small measure the indirect terminus of decisions that you yourself made. Decisions that came about because you weren’t happy to begin with, you shunned contentment and went out on your own, with the name of exploration on your lips, but perchance something very different in your heart.  

Remember this the next time you feel that phantom of the rambler try and take your hand. Seeking you when times are not necessarily bad, but even simply the mundane. It will whisper that things can be more exciting elsewhere. It pours lies into your waiting ears, making you forget that what you now have was at one point everything you ever wanted. And maybe still is.

The person that seeks respite from a life without trouble will undoubtedly find it.. It’s an unfortunate fact that we have to take the bad with the good, otherwise the good would be the mundane, and become lost in the everyday. Recall that whether great, horrible, or indifferent, all the times of your life matter. In an incalculable and cosmic way, the sum is greater than the parts.

There, now you’ve cried for the last time.