Something To Do With Struggle

Today was a weird day. I'm glad it's raining. I wasn't feeling too well today, so I decided to stay home. As soon as it started raining, I felt better--my nose cleared up, but also I felt better emotionally. Not sure why, but I'm guessing a lot of people feel that way when it rains. 

As I was laying flat on an exercise mat this afternoon, trying to hold a pose that was killing me softly, I came to the realization that maybe the thing that makes something beautiful or desirable or "worth it" is struggle. You know exercise is effective when you struggle to execute the movement. You know someone is worth keeping in your life if you make the effort to see them and vice versa. In relationships, if you're with someone with whom you don't have to try at all, you get bored and find someone else. If  you're with someone with whom everything is turbulent all the time, it's monotonous as well and you leave, you find someone else.

But if when you see someone, you feel the need to make the effort to be your best, to listen, to interact, then that friendship/relationship/whatever will probably last.

It got me thinking about how maybe the most difficult thing to do is to actually go through life and to struggle for the middle-ground: for normalcy. Euphoria is just floating, depression is just avoiding the fall.

Gravity is struggle. If you float out in space (euphoria), you don't have to exert effort to get anywhere and yet nothing makes an impact either and if you go dive deep enough (depression), you end up just floating as well. With both, you need something--an oxygen tank, a crutch--to survive; otherwise you drown: you either choke on water or on air. What it means to live is to struggle with dying, what it means to have is to struggle with loss. 

The other day, I was reading Breakfast At Tiffany's and what I found beautiful about the book was (sorry for spoiling) that Paul (Fred) and Holly don't end up together. They don't end up together, but it's okay. It's not overly dramatic; the tension is created by them both striving for normalcy (underneath it all) and I found that very touching and both extremely painful and extremely comforting.

And. That's it for today, really.