Reach

One of my favourite places to be is on my balcony: sitting in my Ikea chair facing the moon, Macbook on my lap, stars in my eyes, heater blasting warm air on my bare legs.

When I was teenager living at home, after a fight with my parents, I'd hop into my dad's turquoise Mazda truck and speed off with half a pack of cigarettes and I would park somewhere and lean up against the outside of the truck and look up into the night sky, puffing my smoke in hopes that it would be the ticket in exchange for an answer of some sort. And of course, it never was. All I got was a step closer to cancer and bad teeth.

But there's something to be said about standing alone and looking into the night sky. It's seemingly endless. In a world without hope, all I see are dead-ends. But the night sky holds promise. It contains a void so large that it would take 800 gazillion years of smoke-blowing to even touch the surface.

We all try to reach it in some way, whether by running or money or success or some other pathetic measure of our own self-worth but if we're truly honest with ourselves, as much as we may feel like we "finally got there" at some point in our lives, we know that we never really have. As soon as we come face to face with the stark reality of our powerlessness, we realize that we are indeed, fuckitty fucked.

We can white-knuckle our way through a nutrition and fitness plan, or we can live out the ideal family of two children, a puppy, and an area rug made out of milk cartons and dandelion fur, but we will eventually come face-to-face with our own limited power, and that day, will blow. Because it hurts. It's humiliating. It's like qualifying for a spelling bee by accurately spelling the word "weird" and then showing up to the contest and having to correctly spell the word "algorithm."

I think the sooner we realize our limited capacity for power, the better. Because there's nothing worse than dragging that shit out. Am I saying that we need to give up before we even start? No! But I think that knowledge is power--that by being aware of our own kryptonite, we will be quicker in asking others for help.

If it takes a village to raise a child, why wouldn't it take the universe to grow the world?