Life is messy. We try to pretend like it’s not, but it is. And that’s okay.
We live in a society where we’ve tried to take the wiggliness of the world and contain it in boxes made of straight lines and ninety-degree angles. You don’t have to take my word for this. Look around you.
As I write I’m sitting in a cafe surrounded by straight lines. The table my feet are on, the windows, even the keys of my keyboard. That’s relatively unproblematic in architecture and design, but the facade goes beyond what we see.
In nature, there are no straight lines, no hard edges or angles. The world is a wiggly place, and it’s better because of it. When water needs to get somewhere, as it almost always seems to, it flows with the curves and doesn’t complain when it meets with a temporary blockage. Water can tend toward vapidity as far as metaphors go, but there is a lot we can learn from it.
Like in nature, there are no straight lines in life, no hard edges. If something appears straightforward, it’s more likely attributable to a failure of scope than to the reality. If you zoom far enough in or out on a map of country roads, the path can appear straight. But if you’ve ever driven on one of these roads, they’re anything but. A short straightaway is quickly followed by a hard bank.
Much of the frustration we encounter in life stems from a desire to avoid the turns. If you tried to avoid or refuse to embrace a turn while driving, you’d crash. So it is in life. In life most crashes aren’t fatal, but they’ll sure make any journey a lot harder and a lot longer than it needs to be.
Trying to navigate life with straight lines, or to contain it in neat little boxes, is a venture destined for failure. We like to imagine that we can create these clear distinctions between the good and the bad, pleasure and pain, work and life, and so on. But like the ocean melts into the sky at an indistinguishable point we call the horizon, so too do our little boxes melt away in the real world.
Given that so much of our lives is dependent on factors beyond our control, our willingness to welcome the wiggliness of the world probably doesn’t make too outsized of a difference on where we’ll end up. However, it can make all the difference to the manner in which we arrive.
Life will always be messy. My life is a mess, and yours probably is too. That’s okay. Our job isn’t to tidy up all the little facets of this human experience like you’d organize your closet. None of us chose to but we’ve all boarded this ride, our job now is only to take it as it comes. Don’t hold on too tight, and maybe even throw your hands up once in a while.

