Learning to live well
Living is what we do until we die. Living well is a skill. A lot of skills, actually.
Some people have native talent for it. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Insofar as I manage to live well, it’s something I’ve learnt to do.
On the whole, though, I do well enough these days that it’s gotten easy to forget how it feels looking at everything from the bottom of a deep hole. I can make myself remember it, but only from a distance, as though I weren’t the person who had felt that way.
Yet I do try to remember. It is my peculiar talent, I think, to reach people not with strength or knowledge or success, but from a stance of shared frailty, shared ignorance, shared failure and shared effort. I don’t want to forget that; it’s the most valuable thing I’ve now and again managed to share successfully.
Which isn’t to say I always get this right, either. I don’t. But now and again, I do…
… which leads me to this very kind and much-appreciated post from my friend and gaming buddy Adrian. He’s spent a lot of his year looking up from the bottom of some holes that feel pretty wretchedly familiar to me, and some other holes that I’ve never fallen into and devoutly hope I never do.
I don’t take credit for the progress he and I both know he’s been making. That’s work, that is, and none of us can do it for another, especially not from halfway around the world. But I have tried to teach him things I know, things I had to learn myself, about living well.
So right back at you, Adrian. I’m very proud of you, and I’m honored by what you say of me, and I thank you, too, for reminding me of the small craft I have, and how I came by it.