“It’s great to be lately, & I hope the same for you too,” scribbled on the last page of the notebook paper in my leather-bound journal, etched with my initials and a mountainscape on the front cover. It’s mine, yet for some reason, has always felt just a bit foreign to me. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a personal journal, only to be read for my eyes and customized to me personally sounds ideal for a writer, right? Not for me, at least.
For the last year, as I’ve scribbled notes about work, life, and play all in these small white pages, I’ve come to realize a few things. Life is a constant ebb & flow of perceived negative and positive instances. What I mean is that all these things happen in our lives, new and old relationships, struggles of identity, and the “right path” to take, it’s all so real and difficult at times. But do we have to identify with all these perceived negative or positive instances of our lives, or can we just flow with it and take them for what they are; experience.
There is this weird pressure that we all put on ourselves to be something, anything. That we have to be sad or mad when things go bad, and vice versa. To identify with the good, the ugly, the “oooh and ahh” or the “FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK’s,” well, it just seems so fucking trivial at this point in my life. At least, that’s how I feel recently.
Most of my friends and myself included all spent four years at a university being told that we were in the process of becoming something, working towards becoming a “journalist” or an “engineer” or whatever for that matter. When we graduated last May, we were all thrown into a world where nobody had any clue what the next day would bring. While some held so tight to the idea that they have to continue to prove to everyone around them that they WILL be this ONE THING and there is no other way. I for one, took the hint from the world to just to strip myself from all these fucking titles, roles, whatever we all put on ourselves and hold so fucking close that in some cases, it ends up causing more harm than any good.
Sure, I may write from time to time. I take pictures and do some video work as well. And I even run my own business as a painter and general contractor, but those are just parts of a larger whole. A mere fraction of myself. Let’s just start with, My name is Chad Ripley and I am a human being. Where we go from there, well that’s up to you and me.
Yes there are times I can go back in the journal from the last year and notice times where I was identifying with the mellow drama of my own life, as Ram Dass like’s to point out. But if I’ve garnered anything from pages and pages worth of suffering and triumph, just plain old existing in this realm, it’s these few things.
Growth is all we can ask for. Progress, not perfection. And a constant surrender to all that is. And that the rainbows always do come after the rain. This game of life isn’t easy, not one bit. But next time you’re stuck in the “FUUUUUUCK THIS,” just try and see if from a different perspective, maybe that “bad” may not be so bad after all.
Chad Ripley 