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Hey y’all, I often wonder how this letter might find you — up, down, stoked, ready to fold, present, somewhere else, sentimental, suffering, ringing with life, kind of bored? We all go through it all. It often crosses my mind that in writing to a few thousand people, in a state-of-being sense, these words will probably find someone just about everywhere. If life were an amusement park ride it would be a roller coaster, and tomorrow someone who reads this will probably be at every point of the ride. We all ride this roller coaster of life. We all have glorious mountaintop days in the sun and slogs through dark shit bogs where the sun doesn’t shine, loss is all we taste, and everything itches. Change is the nature of life. High and low, mountain and valley, win and loss. In recognizing everyone’s on endless varieties of life’s roller coaster, we can tap a deep well of compassion for each other. Wherever we’re at, we can turn to one another, and while the details may not match, we can empathize, and say, “damn, me too.” A bunch of my closest people are in one version or another of the slog-in-the-dark-shit-bog right now. I don’t know whether it’s pure coincidence, pandemic’s wake, or forces beyond my comprehension. However, if it feels like freefall, your coaster lost a wheel, or you snuck into the amusement park at midnight and it was so rad until you worked up the gumption to ride the biggest roller coaster but it stopped three-quarters of the way to the top and you’re stuck for who knows how long and it’s cold and starting to rain and you’re probably going to be arrested for trespassing in the morning, I just wanna say, “damn, me too.” We can do anything from rail against to surrender to the situation for short or long whiles, but lucky for us, the constant in our corner when we’re down is the very thing that brought us there: change. Change is the way in, the way out, and probably the most consistent thing in the entire universe. And dammit, if we survive the change, we best be like eighty-year-old Henry Miller (quoted above), and forgive and forget and begin again and take it as it comes and fall in love with the roller coaster of life and this ever-spinning kaleidoscope of change all over again. Nobody lives on the mountaintop. Those who live the whole of life all follow in the footsteps of Henry Miller, Rocky, and, Chumbawamba letting go and slurring: “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down!” Your brother on the roller coaster of life, Ethan P.S. Click either post below and I’ll read it to ya.
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