Sometimes I want to be like the girl in the photograph - settled snuggly in the warm #lifespiration. Hashtag goals. A perfect braid and warm sweater, coffee and books, stuck in perpetual peace. The light is so soft and ambient that it erases all lines. There's no sweat that went into the perfection of my body.
Sometimes I imagine what a "real" writer would be like - obsessed to the point of spiraling down into the center of me, a workplace that reflects my inner chaos. (Complete with minifridge.) I'd have focus that never wavered. My body would be beautiful even as I'm twisted over the keyboard, shaping myself to the rhythm of the sharp mechanical clack. (Seriously, get a mechanical keyboard. It makes you feel so much more writerly. Once I got one I never went back to membrane keyboards.)
But reality doesn't look like the photograph. It doesn't look like the perfect image. Because reality is a series of interconnected push-pull mechanisms designed to create homeostasis inside the complexity of chaotic impulses. Being alive means delving down into the messiness that is being a biological organism and trying to place context into our consciousness. The girl in the photograph with the perfect braid, cozy sweater, and good book has to check her memory card to try to find the perfect representation of the moment.
She's not living in that moment: She's creaing an image that she never lived. Eventually she gets tired, or hungry, or bored. The amber bubble bursts.
We can't hide inside perfection.
What we can do is appreciate the moment. So oftentimes we sit down with our book and our tea hoping to capture a moment without truly understanding it, understanding where we are and the context we exist in. We're so rapidly trying to emulate that concept of "Relaxation" that we forget to actually relax. We don't understand how magnificent it is that we're a part of human history in which we do get to relax with tea and a book. So the moment feels hollow. We're often so ill at ease and trying desperately to emulate a mood that it passes right by us.
Empires rose and fell to bring you that tea, and the writer who wrote that book had to harvest an entire life to bring you those words. And what you have right then is a moment, a single moment in a chain extending from now to the beginning of life itself.
Understanding complexity and your part in it. Appreciating the moment that hangs finite: That's perfection, not the amber-suspended eternity in the photograph.
Because perfection is often simple. It misses the fine lines. It smooths out the cellulite. But life itself isn't simple. It's bursting with detail, and logistics, and formulas.
And here you are, right at the center of it in your own consciousness.
You will never get there. But you can be here.
Understanding that is how you get close to your ideal happiness, and philosophers and gurus over the years have been saying the same thing since we began trying to amass happiness through riches and ideals and love and the attention of others.
I will never be my idealized, Platonic idea of a writer. But I can appreciate that here I am writing, in lockstep with the finite and eternity. I can accept being human and a writer with all its messiness, frustration, and struggle.
If I don't, I'm always going to be frustrated because I can't live up to an ideal that doesn't even exist.
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