Life is the absence of flat, even streets. It is neither paved nor composed of cobblestones where each unit has been cut with great effort into the same cuboid shape. It’s rough terrain in bad weather, ascents up the backbones of mountains where the air is thin and sudden, steep descents into crowded depths where the pressure is crushing.
Life is a period of little to no respite. It means no rest for the wicked, or for those convinced of their righteousness. It is permanent movement, an Aryan wet dream, an aversion to rest and renewal. Despite birth and creation, it decays, erodes, degenerates and degrades. Life is declension to the mean.
Life is not only constant activity, but eternal honing, practicing, filing, polishing, training, sharpening, seasoning. It is learning. It is awakening. It is feeding the flames.
Life is the mountain trail where goat’s feet are required. It is dizzying heights and stunning views. It is exhaustion, desperation. Confusion. It is working far beyond crumbling points. Life is taking things too far, going beyond the call of duty. It is braving danger and death zones and tempting fates. It cries over spilled milk. It is doing too much and wondering why everything fell apart.
Life is an exercise in futility, an embracing of the tenets of failure. It has been, by design, since the eating of the fruit. Life is cushioned shoes and high heels. A bull in a china shop. A child with a credit card in the candy store. Mere distractions from the realities surrounding us we try so hard to ignore.
Life is the flutter of a hummingbird, the strains of the Northern Cardinal or the Song Thrush, the vibration of bee’s wings drumming to fan the hive and keep it cool. Life is the voyage of the sea turtle Yoshi, who traveled up and down Angola’s coast before swimming all the way to Australia–22,000 miles. Life is the almost-one-year-old Arctic fox who slinked 2,700 miles from Spitsbergen in Northern Norway to Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. It is marsupials, who seem to fit no one's plan.
Life is foot, ankle, calf, shin, knee, thigh, hamstring, and hip pain. It is lameness of one’s lower extremities, it is ingrown toenails, a bum Achilles, plantar fasciitis, blown calf muscles, torn ACLs & MCLs and the athleticism of a Hephaestus.
Life is cheating. It’s lying and stealing and the absence of character, morals, and ethics. It’s forever chemicals. AI when writing a story. The devouring of Harry Potter hotcakes and the utter ignoring of Willy the Wizard. This life is boob jobs, facelifts, pumped-up painted lips, nose jobs, push-up bras and underwear; it’s bleached assholes, liposuction, steroids, hormone “therapy,” phalloplasty and vaginoplasty. It’s saying no to rules and limitations, consequences be damned.
Life is Calhoun’s mice. Life is Milgram’s “You must go on.” Life is the abuse and mental torment inside Stanford Prison…after two days of unscripted guard behavior.
Life is torn-open Christmas gifts played with for five minutes before the first hints of boredom appear. It’s finding out there is no Easter bunny, Santa Claus, or Savior. It’s bad grammar and speling, it’s prone to exaggeration and the raising of mountains from molehills. Life is bland and empty and unrewarding and devoid of hope, love, redemption and kindness.
Life is Mama Cheetah’s tirelessness. It is the courage of the tigress, who’ll tear a young male of its species to pieces defending her cubs. It is the patience of the polar bear, who may travel through 100,000 miles of Canadian wilderness during its lifetime, and who may also wait fourteen hours lying next to an ice hole, playing whac-a-seal, eliminating time from the equation: persistence + time = full stomach.
Life is immortality.
Life is the water strider, whose offspring will either have wings if there is little or increasingly less water in their habitat, or not if there’s plenty. Or bar-headed geese, who routinely fly over the Himalayas. Or Arcadia trees, which not only increase tannin levels to be toxic to the animals feeding on their bark, but release ethylene gas clouds to tell other trees to start increasing their tannin levels, too. It is trees in general, which have different “screams” for instances of drought and for when they are being cut.
Life is the columns in an accountant’s book. It is a visit to the dentist. This life is the droning teacher in Boring 101 who’ll never get you and punishes, get this, YOU for it. Life is the gunk at the bottom of the sink. It is pedophiles and mass murderers, it’s cringeworthy 70’s music (I hear The Carpenters), it’s needing a permit for roadkill*, it’s voting, taxes, PTA meetings; it’s solving the same problems over and over and over and over...[Repeat chorus]. It’s red lights and crossing guards. It’s a pandemic mask discarded in a pile of a hundred thousand other pandemic masks, polluting the environment we really have no use for.
Life is killing fields. It is Jonestown.
Life is an intricate balance of predators and prey, it is mutually beneficial behavior, it is the absence of good guys and bad, right and wrong. It is a fragile ecosystem, which, if upset, may produce something as horrible as the Champawat Tiger, which purportedly killed 436-odd people. It is the place where life and light and love are one and the same. It is the place where green and health merge. It is the oneness of the water in rain, snow, mountain streams, raging rivers, lakes and seas and oceans. Life is the absence of division.
Life is immortality.
Life is this Vonnegut quote, referring to the human eye:
“No combination of Time and Luck could have produced a camera that excellent, not even if the quantity of time had been 1,000,000,000,000 years!”
It is the fact that cows kill more people a year than sharks do.
Life is a pyramid. Life is fire in the middle. Life is an organizational pyramid, a hierarchy, where each and every member is either in or out. Life is a tower, a prong, built of hunger, fueled by fear and jealousy and turmoil, defined by height, cursed by God, and grown so tall that those at the top can no longer see, feel, hear, taste, or smell the ground.
Life is African buffalo herds, deer, and some species of monkey who vote to make decisions; in the case of the first, voters are adult females. Life is a (at least partially) bulletproof armadillo.
Life is far, far away from planet Earth. Conflict results when the former meets the latter. Life is death. It is paved, smooth roads and synthetic pesticides, C-sections and perverted value systems. Life is abortions and babies found in dumpsters. It is gas chambers, gas trucks with “Kaiser’s Coffee Shop” painted on the side so as not to distress the populace; it’s euthanasia, the putting of others to sleep. It’s behavioral euthanasia. Life is being right. Life is being wealthy. Life is false pretenses and a polished outward image. A scam, a con. It’s song and dance men. Rotting insides, pestilent and poisonous, a collapse into blackness. It might never end if we get the ingredients right.
Life and death are two sides of the same coin. The coin was always here, will always be, despite our valiant attempts to prevent this. The living side is growth, abundance, vitality, love and light. Life is life. Beyond belief, miraculous, from the smallest atom to the dance and swirls of galaxies.
We, contrariwise, am become like the other.
*–Check out this post for the explanation: