fall in love with as many things as possible

collecting moments of beauty, joy, and bravery

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me. flying. screaming. living.

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black butte trail no. 4026

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snowmuffs

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how do you measure the progress of a life?

all i know is how not to measure it. i know it’s not like doctors measure your weight on a percentage chart. “mona is in the 80th percentile for her age group!” hooray mona, you can be pointed to on a piece of paper!

it can’t be related to math in any way.  worthwhile job + wholesome boyfriend + eating green things instead of greasy things = ideal 24-year-old? obsession with books − justonemorechapter reading young adult simple enough to quantify an actual beginning and ending (unlike a life) beach books until 4am so you can’t function the next day = normal book lover.

and not with those timelines from world studies. hobart was born, then learned how to make words, then graduated kindergarten despite the rough patch where all he wanted to do was make homemade slime and leave it in children’s backpacks. then he went through all the steps to college and after that there’s huge space between graduation of university and marriage, so naturally that means he progressed naught until the natural next step of marriage.

a life, though, a life, isn’t quantitative, right? if zola discovered spiders had eight legs and science freaked out and thanked her and beau discovered his grandmother’s story as he took care of her for 12 years and nobody thanked him, does that mean zola lived a better life? did she have more progress, more effect on the world? we all know now who and what spiders are. we don’t know beau’s grandmother and we never will.

which makes me think: how can we even begin to think that we can compare lives? if a life isn’t quantifiable in any way, if lives are just all different, why the hell do we (i) feel like i’m always behind or in front of my imagined point on the graph of lives lived? why do we (i) hear about “big things” happening to others and think only why i’m not there yet instead of bully for them i’m going to go back to my ungraphable, baller life now.

comparing lives is like putting a rabbit and a cucumber next to each other and saying oh well the cucumber has obviously progressed more because it’s green.

to hell with progress.

all hail the rabbit.

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I Can’t Stop Eating.

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