A few months ago, a family member asked me, out of the blue, whether I’d ever fully processed my mother’s death.

The question took me by surprise, and I responded that yes, I thought I had, and why did he ask?

He referenced the fact that I’d graduated from a good school and gotten a good job, and then left it to travel. He wondered if I was aimless, floating through life.

I sat with my shock for a moment. I was genuinely surprised that he was using my mother’s death as a rhetorical device and frustrated that any real concern couched in his response was coming a decade and a half too late. I felt a pang of ironic appreciation that someone going through a life transition of his own had decided to question mine and a beat of self-doubt that maybe the whole world saw me that way.

And then I felt confident, because I knew how to explain what had driven me to leave that job and head towards a different way of living. I’d dedicated the last two and a half years to working through it. The one-two punches of a pandemic and a breakup had forced me to rationalize it anew, and I was surer than ever that it was right for me.

There is only one thing I know for sure, and that is what I told him: death is coming for all of us.

My mom’s painful and unexpected death at 41 made it very clear to me that death does not wait. It does not wait for you to have lived out your dreams, to have traveled far from home, to have told someone you loved them. It does not come when it’s meant to or when you’re ready, not unless you’re incredibly lucky. Every second spent on this side of the earth is borrowed time and there is no promise that more will follow.

I do not want to have left anything on the table when my time is up. No goal not gone after. No dream unfilled. I can imagine how that looks like aimlessness to this family member. But I see it as acceptance. I see it as understanding the immovable limitations of life, of all the ways that it cheats you, and deciding to make the most of it anyways.

Losing my mom was the catalyst for me thinking about life in this way, and the rest of what I’ve experienced since then has confirmed it. I was entering high school when the Great Recession hit and I watched the adults in my life falter as the rug of economic stability was pulled out from under them. Ten years later, I’m seeing the pandemic we’re still struggling through kill 200,000 Americans (and, thanks to criminal incompetency and hubris in our leadership, counting) and destroy the job prospects and financial situations of millions more. It’s hard to sit with all of that instability and deeply unjust loss and feel like everything’s going to work out in the end. I have learned that it might—or it might not. And that you could do everything right for your entire life, follow all the paths that worked for people before you, and still end up unhappy, unfulfilled, or dead.

Full-out pursuit of the good

My own personality plays a part in what I do with those takeaways, for sure. I have a clear bias towards action. I could’ve walked out of those formative years, thrown up my hands, resigned myself to the fact that fate would outfox me every time, and settled in to plug along at the well-worn path of work and consumption and work and consumption. That did not appeal.

Stepping away from that path, as frightening as it has been, is the only thing that’s allowed me to feel like I am clawing back a little bit of agency from the universe. I’m under no delusions that I can avoid fate or that disaster and loss won’t continue in my life. But knowing how little of life I can control, I would rather exercise that control in ways that make me feel alive.

Doing that means learning to live not in fear or in wait of the bad, but instead to live in full-out pursuit of the good.

Because the good is underrated.

We are so focused on what’s next: the car, the job, the house, the wedding. On how happy we’ll be once we buy that next thing, on how all our problems will evaporate once we reach that next milestone, on how relaxed we’ll be after that next vacation. And I’m all for setting goals and striving to achieve them. Just not at the cost of enjoying the now and finding the good.

Because the good is everything.

It’s waking up and opening the curtains so the sun lights up the room and then getting to slide back into bed and play hooky from responsibilities for a little while. It’s calling a friend for a wide-ranging catch-up and feeling awe and appreciation at the fact that you two found each other and chose to prioritize each other and will continue to do that over and over again. It’s eating a bowl of Lucky Charms after unloading groceries because an errant commercial made you feel nostalgic and delighting in getting to have marshmallows for dinner.

It’s also climbing to the top of Machu Picchu at dawn and marveling over human ingenuity and eating a seafood empanada on the beach in Punta Diablo while giggly toddlers climb all over you and watching frigate birds dart through the sunset in the Galapagos, but you don’t need to go to any of those places or do any of those thing to experience it. It’s all around, and to find it and to appreciate it, you just have to look.

I want to spend my life, however much of it I have, looking for the good.

I’m still learning how to do it.

Leaving my job gave me the time and energy to step back from racing forward and to start focusing on the present. Traveling extensively showed me how different people and places highlight and make accessible different versions of good and that it’s possible to live in a society that prioritizes everyday joys. Building a business that lets me use my talent and creativity to make impact but also protects my time and energy has confirmed that I want to work and that I still relish the pursuit of a win but that I can do so in a way that doesn’t tradeoff my physical or mental health. And now, sitting in one spot, trying to heal from lost love, working on the next evolution of my business, reflecting on who I am, how I got here, and who I want to be, I’m learning how to sit with the bad better, to accept it and to acknowledge that it will always be present, knowing that the good will be, too.

I know that who we are is not what we leave behind, but how we showed up in the lives of the people we love. Lately, I’ve been asking myself if I’m showing up in the way I want to. Am I bringing understanding, joy, acceptance, and love to the people in my life? I want to be a person who listens, who accepts, who celebrates, who helps. Have I understood my own needs and my own suffering and found healthy ways to address them, in order to bring the best of myself to others?  

I’ve just summarized my life mission as full-out pursuit of the good every day and taking care of myself such that I can be a source of good for others, and now feels like a good time to clarify that I fail constantly at both parts of that mission.

Knowing what I’m trying to do with my life and doing it well all the time are two very different things. Mistakes I’ve made race to my mind like divers with the bends: I’ve been close-minded, I’ve been short-tempered, I’ve been unempathetic, I’ve been hurtful. I have gotten caught up comparing my life to someone else’s. I have overstepped someone else’s boundaries, thinking I knew better than them. I have pushed myself too hard for too long, expecting that I could run on E without consequences.

But making mistakes is part of it. In doing those idiot things and examining them afterwards, I learn more than I would if I sat on my hands and wondered what would’ve happened if. If I’d tried having that conversation. If I’d taken on that project. If I’d let myself fall in love. I have come to see the good even in the pain of the mistakes. And sitting with that pain and cherishing whatever meaning I can glean from it bodes well for making better mistakes in the future.  

When the good is not enough

There are two things I struggle with as I progress along this path I’ve made for myself.

The first is recognizing that happiness, a positive attitude, and an appreciation for the small things do not always stand up against pain.

These last few months have been the hardest I’ve ever experienced. I’ve felt more depressed, more anxious, and sadder than I ever have before, and in my lowest moments, I’ve been unable to see anything to look forward to or be positive about. I recognize that I am feeling all this pain against the backdrop of a world-altering pandemic, but I also recognize that my specific pain, stemming from a breakup with someone I loved and a fallout with family, was caused by fairly run-of-the-mill parts of the human experience, and even obvious consequences of taking risks in the first place.

So if it feels this bad now, what will it feel like when I get sick? Or lose a child? Or get divorced? Or have to bury more family members? More bad things can and will happen in my life because they’re part of what life is, and if life is this hard to endure now, with the relatively small-fry problems I’m facing, how could I ever get through what’s to come? Am I putting in all this effort to heal and grow from this and become stronger and move forward only to be dragged again by the next wave of pain, whenever it arrives? Wouldn’t it be easier if I just stayed down?

On tough days, I don’t have a good answer to that question.

On easier days, I can clearly remember that pain has made me into a better, more adaptive, more understanding version of myself before and that it’ll probably do so again. I can recognize that this particular breed of pain, of heartbreak, is a uniquely human feeling I now can share in, like I’ve unlocked another level of what it means to be alive.

On all days, I remind myself to see, in every lightning storm and algorithmized playlist and crunchy leaf and well-organized grocery store, that the small things are still beautiful and that enough of them, gathered together, can turn into buoys to hold onto and float with for a while.

The second difficult thing is keeping perspective.

Even though I’m living more in the present, I haven’t abandoned the future. If entirely delayed gratification is too far in one direction, hedonistic gluttony is too far in the other, and in the case that I do get another ten or twenty or fifty years to live, I want to have the relationships and the resources necessary to enjoy them. I know that this actualization of my life philosophy, where I travel around with no permanent home and write for a living, is just one of many articulations of it, and that I have to straddle the balance between enjoying this present moment and not hamstringing myself for a future one.

I’ve written about this before through the metaphor of pillars. Stripping away some of the scaffolding of my life—a job, an apartment, a set of people I saw every day—to examine who I was at my core and give my dreams space to unfurl has been both freeing and isolating. That’s why we travel at all; it’s distance from the mundane that turns into space to grow. Abruptly losing the way I traveled and the person I traveled with collapsed that space into a freefall, and I was looking every which way for something to hold onto.

The people I love have helped me to see that I am my own something to hold onto.

I think about how they’ve provided that perspective in the same way I think about my nearsightedness.

Without glasses on or contacts in, I can’t see a thing. Even looking at my own face in a mirror with only a bathroom sink between me and my reflection is an exercise in abstractionism.

But if I climb up onto the counter and press my nose against the glass, I can see it all—every freckle, every eyelash.

Every conversation I’ve had with my loved ones over the last few months has been them grabbing that mirror and walking it right up to me.

It has been Mallory telling me that I’m an example of finding community whenever I go. Or Camilla that I have a capacity for joy that she’s never seen before. Or Dani that I do everything I can for the people that I love. Or Isabelle that I should be proud of how I communicate and advocate for what I need. Or my cousin that I have a gift for making people feel seen. Or my sister that I am what she thinks of when she thinks of strength.

I needed to be reminded that those things are true. To sit there and realize: that is how I am showing up for myself, how I am showing up for others.

Onwards and onwards

I’ve been watching Selling Sunset lately. There are all these scenes of tight-skirted realtors inching down steep driveways in sky-high heels, just a tiny misstep away from smacking their Botoxed faces into the asphalt. I’ve felt like that. Like I’m carefully picking out a path through my ambition and my obligations and my dreams and my insecurities and sometimes on such unsure footing that a stiff breeze could send me careening towards the ground.

I haven’t fallen, though, and I don’t think I will. My loved ones have righted me. My experiences have shored up my balance. My dreams, as they’ve grown and changed and been pursued and been reprioritized, have kept me facing forward.

Death is coming for all of us.

I have a lot more living to do first.