Life is a prison.

Life is a gift that far too many people don’t understand or appreciate.

Life is fleeting, far too short in the interest of fairness.

Life drags on and on.

Life is an open journey with infinite pathways to explore.

Life is a straight line to death.

Life sucks.

Life is not a choice.

Life is choice.

Choose life.

Life is for the living.

Live fast, die young, and let god sort out the underwear situation.

I’m standing outside my office building, iPod drowning out the world with whatever is on the shuffle at the moment — a little of the new OSI, some Dark Lunacy, Colin James Hay. The air is perfect, dry, cool, carried on a constant but shifting breeze from the west that seems to push the constant flow of traffic past me. I light my afternoon cigarette, and as Waiting for My Real Life To Begin segues into William Orbit’s Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, the breeze becomes a steady gust, and the world is filtered through effects that every independent filmmaker wishes they had in their computer. The color is firm and pristine, every gradient smooth, every border fine and distinct. The light coming through the layers of tree branches and spring leaves creates beams that you can’t see but know are there nonetheless.

And then the shadows on the sidewalk begin to dance, a kaleidoscope of shifting sand chaos patterns, levels of shadow moving independent of one another, an abstract music video for a non-linear piece. I’m all-too-briefly caught in what I can only barely describe as a hallucinated shared memory as the world passes at it’s usual rate all around a magical display in back and white at ten frames per second.

Life is in between moments, small details, things that you find between ticks on the clock and inside of individual breaths. Life is in the here and now, and it’s easy to miss if you’re too busy thinking about the then and there, whether coming or gone. Life is infinite potential, defined by perspective, shaped by experience, shared by forever too few.

Even in a world that has too few hours in the day, too few days in the week, too little time to accomplish a tiny fraction of everything that I hope, life goes on all around me, and anyone who thinks that I’m missing out on something simply sees things through different eyes than mine. And that’s okay, because they’ve got life, same as me.

Life deserves more appreciation from a distant standpoint.

Even if it’s just a dream, or the product of a far-away brain in a jar, or a collective memory, or an accidental side-effect of too many micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide taken fifteen years past, life is full of anything you want to find, if you know how to look for it.

I can never submit to all the things you’ve said God
If you want me dead, I’m right here God
But fear is a funny thing God
In that it gives you the strength to resist just about anything God
-Pain of Salvation, Diffidentia

Life is. And that’s enough for me, today.