Dancing in the Rain

One guy I dated once told me scornfully, “Please! You think we’re in some stupid teenage drama where everything is beautiful and it will all work out? Wake up! Life sucks! This is reality, suck it up!!”

He was wrong. Very wrong.

Life sucks only because we choose to see that it sucks. Reality is nothing near the dreams or ideals we once had because with each knock that we experience in life, we lose a little of that idealism, that hope…until ultimately, we are all too busy scrambling to make a decent enough living to hope or dream. And we accept that life does,indeed, suck.

Yet, the happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything.They just make the best of everything they have. After all, as the mass email I received the other day says, life really isn’t about how to survive the storm, but how to dance in the rain.

And why should we “suck it up”? Why should we accept that “life” is just this terrible, harsh, dull existence? We reduce and resign ourselves to living in “the rat race”, shrug our shoulders and say meekly “no choice what.” When a recession hits, the economy collapses and we have to pull 14-hour days to earn a meagre salary that is just enough to keep our family from starving, it’s the same refrain – “No choice what.” And when life hands me lemons and decrees that I should live out my days on the sidelines, I should just give the same long-suffering sigh and say “No choice what”?

I disagree. There is a choice. It may not be obvious but it’s there. And if you think there really isn’t one, then by God, create one—a choice that is more palatable to you than the ones facing you now. The choices that are obvious to me, the choices in front of me, suck. They stink. So,I am choosing the invisible choice – an option of my own creation.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. —Samuel Johnson