Spacemen

Well it was another beautiful morning here at William and Mary. The sun is shining. The air was warm and welcoming. The birds sang their celebratory "tweedly deets" and the Earth was happy.

The same could not be said for the poor soul who woke up on my couch this morning, half covered in his own vomit from the night before, looking sweaty and exhausted even while sleeping. That's what I walked out of my bedroom to find.

But you know what? As great as all the pretty things I started off with are, there's nothing like some good ol' fashioned suffering and regret. And this guy was experiencing some high-octane, low sulfur, premium suffering and regret as he slowly wiped the couch cushions clean.

Every once in a while I saw him catch a peek at himself in the mirror on the opposite wall of the couch and that's what suffering is all about. That's what good suffering is. Really seeing yourself, taking the broken and charred fragments of yourself from the night before and looking at and going, "This is me! It must still be me because I have no other choice!" And then you gotta whip out the duct tape and crazy glue and start piecing yourself back together. But in doing that, you try to gain a greater appreciation and understanding for what makes you who are you.

Let's say you had a car and you never bother to learn what makes the car work. You ascribe the power of horseless carriage locomotion to magic or the temperament of the vehicle. And if that car breaks down, you have two choices. You can, a) get mad at it and get someone else to fix it and go on being ignorant of your car's needs and continue your cycle of hate and confusion. Or you can get your hands greasy and figure out what makes the box with wheels go! And then you can't hate the car anymore. You just know what needs to be fixed when it doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

That's what you stand to gain by accepting your suffering. If you wake up with vomit on your face, death in your guts, and pain in your head, you gotta say to yourself, "Oh hey, World! Looks like I just fertilized myself because I've got some growing to do!"

So that's why I wasn't mad at vomit on my nice things. Because that guy, a great guy, was getting some quality time with himself as he picked out tiny bits of partially digested chicken out of my rug.

And then later on my run I was trudging down the sidewalk in the heat, feeling all kinds of terrible but I thought of him, and I thought, "Me too! Terrible for me too!"

And I was looking at myself, I was looking at my parts and I came to the same conclusion I come to whenever I'm having a long, boring, painful run, "If I finish this I might successfully sweat out a little bit more of whatever makes me such a wimp."

Go out and make some mistakes! And be like, "How stupid was that?! I have acquired knowledge of my failure as a person! Watch as I now transform to: A SLIGHTLY BETTER PERSON!"

And maybe that's all you can hope for until Free Slurpee Day rolls around again.