Conscious Partying
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The good times never last forever. Neither do the bad times, but when you’re in the thick of the darkness you always have the light to look forward to. When times are great, the natural instinct is to imagine that they will never end. This inevitably causes more despair than it should when the wave crashes down.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Life is not suffering, but life contains suffering. And suffering, like everything else, is transient. When times are bad, the hope of things getting better is what keeps us going. When times are good, it is good to remember that pleasures are just as fleeting as pain, and that the prospect of dark times lies somewhere in the future.
If anything, this will make you cling tighter to the good times, embrace them, and live more in the moment. When you appreciate what you’ve got, you feel it more. Each sensation makes a longer-lasting impression because you know, deep in your soul, that you may never experience it again.
The hope, of course, is that the wave will once again crest and you will be riding atop it for a time. But if that bright day never comes, and all you have left are your memories of past sensations, those memories may be stronger if you really grasped the importance of the good times as they happened. Am I saying that a little paranoia goes a long way? “Paranoia” is a strong word, but I struggle to find a better one.
All the best parties have an air of melancholy about them. The best times I have had with friends, and I don’t mean drunken debauchery and sinful hedonism, but just good times, were usually the last or close to the last times I was ever gathered with those particular people. They represented snapshots that will never come again. Try as we might to replicate those feelings, they are gone for good, and the bitter lingers in my heart almost as much as the sweet. We will get older. We will change. People will drift apart, geographically and spiritually and emotionally. Understand this, and make your embrace of the present fiercer.
This is not fatalistic. This is not a foolish expression of hedonism, to eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. Far from it! When you eat and drink and are merry, it’s good to understand that the eating and drinking and merrymaking are not the be-all, end-all aims of life, and that pleasure should not be your pursuit. But we were not made for misery, and we should enjoy and embrace the pleasures we can, as long as these pleasures don’t destroy our spirit and take our eyes off the prize.
Being conscious of the difficult parts of life helps keep us from being blindsided when they come.
Keep the party going with a good book.
