oof

So of course I miss you and miss you bad
But I also felt this way when I was still with you
Yes of course I miss you and miss you bad
But I also felt this way when I was still with you

-The Whitest Boy Alive, “Golden Cage”

It struck me that

I think the most romantic thing you can say about your significant other is that he is your best friend

Today I decided that

We are all born into a global situation that is in so many ways profoundly messed up. Who you are is defined by how you react to that situation.

Unceasing exploration

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Read and travel, travel and read

The world is a book and those who stay at home read only one page.

-Saint Augustine

The good life

The virtuous person’s life is not most worth living because it is most pleasant. It is most pleasant because it is most worth living.

-Daniel Russell, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life (126)

Hope vs. despair

One of my closest friends just found out that her boyfriend cheated on her.

This was no casual relationship. They’ve been dating since high school.

They were a great couple. Interested in the same things, close with their families and each others’ families, physically active, similar career choices, and after working hard to maintain a fulfilling long-distance relationship while she was in college in Chicago and he in Boston, they were finally going to be reunited by full-time jobs in Chicago.

And now they’re over for good.

It makes me want to cry.

How could he do this to her? I can’t imagine someone who deserves it less. Smart, funny, talented, loving, not to mention drop-dead gorgeous with a figure that should be in a magazine.

But in a way that’s beside the point. No one deserves the pain of calling the man she loves and hearing the voice of a woman on the other end. A woman whom it turns out was sleeping with that man.

It’s disgusting, and it’s sad. Maybe why it’s getting to me so much is that I’m in a serious relationship now. One that means a lot to me. Commitment, entrusting so much of your happiness to another person, is terrifying. In some ways, it’d be easier to be alone. Not that that’s something I am remotely considering. I’m happily in love. But it still scares me that so much of my current happiness is dependent on the actions of another person and on the state of my relationship with that person.

I was thinking about what I could possibly tell her, this amazing, wonderful, caring, loving girl whose whole world has just been turned upside down. And I went off on a mental tangent:

You know what I think – I think we are not neutral vessels. We are not vacuums. If we don’t choose hope and love, fear and anger will come rushing in unbidden. You cannot choose to rid yourself of negative emotions without choosing to replace them with positive emotions. They’re one and the same choice. “If you don’t have hope you have nothing” – that’s false. If you don’t have hope, you have less than nothing – you have fear, anger, stress, sadness. That’s what will fill up the space where hope used to be if you lose hope.

Not particularly specific to her current situation, but this is the conclusion I came to while thinking about it.

She’ll get through this. She is strong and she will come back stronger than ever.

But I can’t imagine her pain right now.