If humans had taglines, what would yours be?

I was listening to AJR’ s The Good Part in full, for the first time. Of course I’ve heard it before on Insta, but only the chorus, attached to a cheesy, but sweet reel of finally happy people. Then I said to myself, maybe there’s a post coming. I opened the app to start a new post and this was the prompt question for today. Yes, a post was indeed coming.

For as long as I can remember, I was waiting for something better. For as long as I can remember my thoughts, I was unfulfilled and dissatisfied, always saying that the next step in my life would make me happy.

My tagline must have been So can we skip to the good part? When I was in middle school, I thought that high school would be better. When I was in high school, I thought that college would be better. When I got sick and tired of college, I thought that graduating would be better. When I graduated, I thought that having a job and adulting would be better. And I could go on.

Now, that I find myself missing all those times in my life, that I surprise myself remembering only the good parts and not ever counting the shit that made me want to skip to the next step, I am grateful and sad at the same time. Grateful for having so much good stuff to miss, sad that I wasn’t appreciative enough in the moment and that I cannot relive it once more. You can say that skipping to the good part, in this case, would mean to rewind the tape, not fast forward it.

As I get more introspective about the subject, I realize that maybe I would have wanted to skip every time to the next step, and the final good part would have been death. Thanks to this realization and to the fact that I’ve encountered some health hiccups, I tried to find a solution.

Most times, I fall back on the known track and start complaining and wishing that I could just sleep like Sleeping Beauty for a couple of months and wake up in the good part. But what if, when I wake up and am in the “good part” I imagined for myself a couple of months back, I’m not happy and I wanna go back to sleep again? That means that I would have to be asleep most of my life and, when I’m awake, I would just want to go back to sleep. Awesome lifestyle, right? Almost as good as a cat’s life, but they are happier.

As much as I hate the quotes about how life is a journey, not a destination, well, they are painfully fucking true. Because, as the endless series of movies has shown us, death is the final destination. Death or sleep, in the case of some fictional characters.

What should I do? Should I be pathologically happy all the time, as if lobotomized? This makes me think of Jack Nicholson’s heart breaking grin at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So no, blissful happiness is not the solution, nor is sleeping my life away. I’m postponing writing down the solution because I’m so afraid of it.

But enough is enough. The solution, ladies and gentlemen, as far as I am concerned, is a loving acceptance, a whole heartedly embrace of the ups and downs. Is it easy? Fuck, no. Is it pleasurable? Hell, no. Is it worth it? By God, yes. Because, as another annoyingly true quote says, you cannot see the good without the bad. You cannot feel happy if you’ve never felt sad. You cannot have day without night. And, let’s face it, nighttime has it’s mysterious beauty. It’s scarier, lonelier and quieter, yes. But, viewed from a different angle, it’s also mystical, romantic and introspective.

So, maybe, the solution is even simpler than acceptance. Maybe the solution is changing the perspective. You don’t have to necessarily accept the situation, you just have to find the light in it.