Biscuits & Sisyphus

This photo is of a card that my absolutely awesome BFF (who I know is stalking this blip :)) sent me a few years ago, when I was going through an especially rough patch. I've told her this many times - there are few things that melt my heart as much as this card does. Especially because I think it captures the true spirit of friendship. We shoo away each other's naughty enemy biscuits.

She sent me this article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/14/miranda-sawyer-midlife-crisis-mortality) a couple of days ago, with the caption: "This will be me in a few years (always ahead of my time)." Made me stop and think.

I'm 28 years old (and 5 weeks, in case we're looking for exact figures), and over the last few months I've had a number of conversations with different people about what age/time in their life they thought was the most perfect. Interestingly, everyone in the 27 - 30 group almost invariably says, "now". I think the best explanation for it is something I saw just now on a friend's FB status:

" I'm slowly learning that your 20s are really about both accepting and fighting your way into the person you're destined to become. Then it sort of gets easier, or so I'd like to think:-). But who cares. Easy or not, it's just about making awesome stuff happen."

Also, on 'The Myth of Sisyphus' by Albert Camus (and I can't find where this is originally from, unfortunately. Full credit to the author, who is not me.):

Camus thought that following the absurd through to its logical conclusion is the only way to liberate oneself from existential worry. In other words, learn to embrace, or at least tolerate, the sheer weirdness of your existence, and you will have a much easier go of things. Camus uses the story of Sisyphus, a mythological troublemaker doomed by the Gods to push a boulder to the top of a hill over and over for eternity, to illustrate the struggles of the absurd hero. Each time Sisyphus gets the boulder to the top, he watches it roll back down to the bottom. But Camus famously decided that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, content and even joyous to accept rock-pushing as simultaneously the method and meaning of his existence.

Back to the Guardian article:

"When people torment themselves with: 'If only I had? or if only I were?'," she writes, "I like to bring them to their actual felt experience of being alive in the present. People can suddenly find themselves alone, or jobless, at midlife and panic that they need another person or job in order to be alive. But that is only an idea. I like to keep things experience-based rather than idea-based. When they really experience the different relationships and occupations they actually have, they find that they are thriving."

Midlife or not, in the end, or in the middle, these are the days of my life. These are the days of your life. And the thing to do ? is live them.

Shoo, naughty enemy biscuits (fear, self-doubt, uncertainty, worry).