Greenlights

by Matthew McConaughey

I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things down so I could forget. The idea of revisiting my life and musings was a daunting one; I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy the company.

The problems we face today eventually turn into blessings in the rearview mirror of life. In time, yesterday’s red light leads us to a greenlight. All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure. In this life or the next, what goes down will come up. It’s a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it. Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.

My parents didn’t hope we would follow their rules, they expected us to. A denied expectation hurts more than a denied hope, while a fulfilled hope makes us happier than a fulfilled expectation. Hope’s got a higher return on happiness and less debit on denial, it’s just not as measurable. My parents measured.

She’s a true baller, living proof that the value of denial depends on one’s level of commitment to it.

We cannot fully appreciate the light without the shadows. We have to be thrown off balance to find our footing. It’s better to jump than fall. And here I am.

The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us—the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things—the sooner we get better at them. We must be more than just happy to be here.

when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss, who are we to think we don’t deserve these fortunes when they are in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven’t earned them? If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we aren’t thinking of the finish line, we’re not looking at the clock, we’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time, where the approach is the destination, and there is no goal line because we are never finished. When Bo Jackson scored, he ran over the goal line, through the end zone, and up the tunnel . The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it. When we truly latch on to the fact that we are going to die at some point in time, we have more presence in this one. Reach beyond your grasp, have immortal finish lines, and turn your red light green, ...

Sometimes we don’t need advice. Sometimes we just need to hear we’re not the only one.

I have hope, and the man I want to be sleeps in the same bed with the man I am, in head, heart, spirit, and body. I don’t always enjoy my company because of that son of a bitch Jiminy Cricket, but I am rarely able to knock him off my shoulder either. And for good reason. Even when I’m out of tune, off frequency, having trouble feeling any traction or viscosity between my being and my actions, or, alternately, when I am so lost in the music that I am unaware, my best self is always there, and he will start the Socratic dialogue sooner than I choose to hear him and long after I want to, because he’s insatiable. I, of course, eventually do hear him, then the challenge becomes, to listen. Once I do, and stop pitting fate against responsibility, truth against fiction, sins against who I wish I was, selfishness against selflessness, mortality against eternity, I learn, and then begin just being who I am, and doing what I do, for me—not for anyone else and for everyone else at the same time. For me and God, together. Then I realize I am responsible for fate, fiction is truthful, a sinner and saint I am, an egotistical utilitarian as well. I’ll be mortal forever. Now, each step at a time has the big picture in mind, and I am the man I want to be, Jiminy Cricket is a bluebird on my shoulder, and Socrates has one voice.

One night, after an afternoon of racing camels in the Sahara, Issa, two of his well-educated friends, Ali (not Farka Touré) and Amadou, and I were finishing dinner on the veranda of the hotel restaurant when a pretty young lady about twenty-five years of age came strolling through, having a solicitous look at each table full of males. It was obvious she was a lady of the night and was trolling for business. “Oh, this is, this is not good,” said Ali. “This is a Muslim woman, and this is not the Muslim way. You do not go and sell your body, this is a disgrace, she should not be doing this.” “Well,” Amadou countered, “it is not for any of us to judge what someone should or should not be doing. We do not know her particular circumstances, what she does or does not is not for us to say.” The two men went back and forth in this conversation, which grew increasingly animated, passionate, and loud. In what appeared to me to be an argument, I interjected at the first pause in their discussion. “I agree with Ali. It is not what she should be doing. She is young and has her health, she should be putting out more effort to have a respectable job rather than choosing prostitution at her young and able age. I believe Ali is right, I think—” Just then, Ali, the guy whose side I was agreeing with, snapped at me, “It is not about right or wrong. It is ‘Do you understand?!’” Slightly stunned, I leaned back in my chair sheepishly as Ali stared at me with sobering vengeance. At last, Amadou, ...

I hope to give my children the opportunity to find what they love to do, work to be great at it, pursue it, and do it. Rather than cover their eyes from ugly truths, I want to cover their eyes from fictional fantasies that will handicap their ability to negotiate tomorrow’s reality. I believe they can handle it.

as racism reared its ugly head into the spotlight once again, we were reminded that All Lives couldn’t matter until Black Lives matter more.

So rather than struggle against time and waste it, let’s dance with time and redeem it, because we don’t live longer when we try not to die, we live longer when we’re too busy livin.