Adulted Paradox

What's it like to be an adult?

To live in constant paradox. Despair and joy, same room, same sequence of events.

Childhood, adolescence, adulthood—all now. You're every age.

Fear and not-fear often go together.

Loving means losing or the risk of losing. Always has.

Feeling and thinking, which shouldn't be hard but somehow are.

Fully grateful. Fully sad. Fully joyful. Not taking turns—all three.

Feeling scammed and also aware that you can cut corners. You did today.

Your desire to be right and your comfort being wrong. Limited by the normal set of factors. The walls you build inside your own brain.

Being an adult is living inside something that refuses description. Like a wild animal. Try to name it and it bolts deeper into the woods. Like two crayon-colored circles that overlap and coexist.

A Letter from Anna to Anna

Dear Anna,

Don’t get lost in smoke and noise.

Come back home.

Outrage is used as a tactic.

Your participation is voluntary.

Be wiser than the smoke and flares.

Calm yourself.

Bring the wise voices from history into your thinking. Elie Wiesel and Marcus Aurelius await.

Get out of the endless “I.”

Get out of main character syndrome.

Don’t get lost in a sea of unconvincing ego claims. If there’s no conversation, if there’s no real discourse, there’s a problem—no matter what side someone is on.

Engagement with the truth means a duty to cut through noise and find signal. Find the signal.

Humility is where you begin.

Love, Anna

What do you get to have?

You don't get to have everything that you want.

Even the things that you do want, which are good for you, often aren't yours.

You don't get to know everything you want to know.

You don't get to do everything you want to do.

You don’t get to be everything you want to be.

What do you get to have?

You get to have a practice -

a practice which you do over and over again.

A practice, which is another word for your life.

More than doing it once, you get to keep doing what you decided to do.

You get to have a practice that, if you choose, can become more alive instead of dead.