An Open Letter

I thought about someone growing up with a strong community and network, and then eventually their life changing to one with less. I could feel that fear of doing something wrong, and messing up your once shot at life. The fear of doing something wrong or bad for fear of ruining the rest of your experience. And this made me write down: there will always be anxiety in new or change.

The whole reason I thought about this was because I was just perceiving the feeling of my fear of change. But in writing that and reading it, I thought of parallels – and I thought about how people react to change. Imagine you're in some single player story game, and you just did something completely new. Depending on what kind of game it is, you may feel afraid of ruining the run or getting a bad ending. But there could also be someone who sees it as exciting, living without fear of a “bad ending” but rather wanting to see where that went. And then they're excited. I think the willingness to be content with the experience of a bad ending is a power by virtue of always having succeeded. Imagine you threw away your life into a pit of addiction and an early death. I'd argue you could see this and think this was a success, since you got to experience an incredibly unique experience. Unique in the sense most life's will have a lot of things – almost everyone's going to feel the experience of running, their first love, getting hurt bad etc. But most won't feel the nightmarish descriptions of addiction. And so that's an incredibly rare experience! Yes it was horrible, but if I'm consistent with how I see life (the point is to experience as much as you can) then this was an incredible life. In this lens I think I am free from discontentment, since am I not leading a perfect, exploratory life?