Preserve or Thrive

Good morning ladies and gentleman

I’ve always had a strangely obsessive way of looking at things. Its this idea that everything we do is born of some form of emotional reaction. Every story ever told is primarily designed to illicit some form of emotion from you, as has every moment and every action in your life, every act in every scene, from the first exclamation to the curtain fall.

The first time you kissed them, the day you passed your driving test, the day you got into university, the day you got arrested and the day the relationship was over. It created something in you, something to this day you don’t really understand because understanding isn’t feeling.

It is, when all is said and done, the fundamental building blocks of you. Whether the person looking back at you in the reflection is someone you like or not, it is the creation of you. Without the success, the failure, the pain, the pleasure, the loss life love envy lust and everything in between, you would’t be you.

We have a habit of concentrating on the negative aspects of our lives. It’s like we spend so long working to attain this ultimate idea or pleasure, this presumption that “if i can take it i can make it” to the point of madness in this tireless obsession to reach happiness. You could spend weeks, months, years or decades working towards this without ever truly making it, so never really finding any form of happiness.

In a way, the endless chase could be a form of self preservation. Take for example, love. It is a concept i’ve been theorising about in numerous different forms for years now, but recently come up with the most accurate description i’ve ever come up with. It is the breakdown of self preservation, a fundamental breakdown of this basic evolutionary need to survive, born from a sort of predictable nature of existence.

This desire for structure has created a society of predictable entities, simply because thats the easiest way for us to live and love throughout life. It is the key to preservation, for if you see all the possible moves across the chess board, because then you can’t slip up.

Love is a questioning of this notion. It’s takes the concept of “self” out of the equation. You are giving the keys to everything you are, your pain, your joy, your pleasure and wander to someone else, then hoping they don’t go and drive it off the end of the cliff. I’ve always been enamoured by this idea, because its completely backwards to what we are designed as a species to do, yet so many people do it everyday.

What makes you question your overreaching need for self preservation?

We have a need to preserve ourselves, but a far more overpowering need is to thrive. We need to thrive because then and only then do we get to truly live. We have all been through some form of pain- a constant, overbearing weight you think you’re “supposed” to carry around, that you’re “supposed” to be exhausted at the end of the day while left with a stomach turning pain that you achieved nothing with yet another day. We are told that life “should” be painful, for without pain there is no beauty. But what you are “supposed” to do with it? That is entirely up to you. Hence I write.

I write. You paint, you build, you love. We need to thrive in order to live a life far outside the realms of what we see and what we believe. We thrive for the desire in your heart and the desire that is bursting from the very soul that drives you.

Driving you to what? To happiness- to success- to love?. Whatever it might be, we need to thrive and in the right situation and in the right headspace, the simple act of showing up every minute of everyday, working on yourself, being the best version of yourself is all you can ask of yourself.

For sure you could live to preserve life. Witness the structure laid out in front of you and take the steps as they are presented to you. See the walls laid out around you, make you bed and watch them close in. Be happy with what you got because the alternative is question your life, to question where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. A population of free thinking, critical thinking people is scary.

Why? Because then you have a group of individuals that are learning and sharing with each other- to then eventually and inevitably become a vastly superior version of the people that went into that very group. Those people that went in reluctant, curious about what would happen, nervous about being judged, feeling like they were worthy only of ridicule as they opened the door of possibility, the idea that maybe they could be more, after continuously having it thrown back in their face and the door slammed with that sam unmistakable thud.

Without believing you live in a world where you could thrive in your creativity and your artistry, and not even having the mental tools to fight for this right, we will only preserve the constant cycle, the endless loop of nothing we call existence. Self preservation has the means to be powerful, but to thrive could be so much more.

So live, not only to sustain life, but to thrive.

Yours, with love as always.

D.R x

Feel the colour. DR

The Thing about life is…

Good evening ladies and gentleman

The thing about life is…

I’ve been throwing this phrase about for months now. It plays through my mind endlessly, over and over… five little words that are so powerful, yet so bleak and scary, beautiful, wistful, wonderful, so entrenched in darkness and saturated in the amber glow of a summer morning.

The thing about life is…

How does one even finish that sentence?Let alone writing a sentence, a paragraph, a page or a novel on the idea, how does one even understand it?

How do you understand life? You don’t know anything about something if you don’t at least try to understand it surely? We spend so long lost in ideas, but they are never our ideas. We live in ideas of love, ideas of connection, of pain- of passion. Even sex has become so obsolete to so many because we are so terrified of what we want, scarier still because we don’t even know what we want.

For months this phrase has plagued me, over and over i say those five little words and haven’t been able to find the words to finish that sentence in any meaningful way. You could wander into that cliche of understanding life with the phrase “I love you” and when you are upset with them you fall full circle to “fuck you.”

It can facilitate darkness, misery and depression, has the means to create any sort of wander, joy, happiness basking in its own powerful glow. The thing about life is one thing. One thing only.

What do you desire…and how far are you willing to go to get it? Moreover than writing, painting, running, fighting, building, directing, destroying, its anything. The thing you’re confused by, the thing that creates a joy in your heart and leaves you yearning for its warm comfort when the painful, sad, boring mediocrity of life tries to grasp your neck and choke the very life out of you.

When the voice in your head is screaming at you, when it says that you’re ugly, that you can’t be yourself, that you shouldn’t paint, that your friends are better looking than you, that you don’t have a nice car or don’t see the point of carrying on in the life that your living, look to the thing you turn to.

Look to it and listen, please listen. You need that part of you, or joy, real joy will never reveal itself to you. The world is exhausting, so exhausting. It’s full of loud noises, scary thoughts and ideas that so many people spend their entire lives avoiding. Don’t be them. You aren’t them.

You are so much more.

Be the one thing in life that scares you. Scares you to the point where you want to hide at the bottom of a bottle or at the end of the shotgun barrel. Resist society, resist existence, and then your life is truly yours once again.

Break through the wall, never return through it, and do the only thing worth doing. The thing about life is… its so fucking difficult to be you- but if you find them, and few people do.

It will be beautiful.

Yours, with love as always.
D. R x

Photo by Andrew Neel