Let's be real, here

I’ll start off by saying that I don’t believe my title. To say that life is great, good, or even enjoyable at all is not only unprovable, but also at times seemingly entirely untrue. As human beings we’re just sort of tossed here by uncontrollable forces and are forced to ‘put up’ with what life throws at us: diseases, poverty, struggle, death. Life can be difficult, it can be overwhelming, it can be painful, and it without doubt can sometimes feel like too much. We’re surrounded by hard decisions, seemingly impossible challenges, and physical and mental barriers. The things we want to create, obtain, or achieve are often too far beyond our reach or capacity to fulfill, and this makes us seem stuck, static, and stagnant. We feel empty, we feel useless, we feel drained. We push through each hour just to make it to the next day, each day to make it to the next week, each week to make it to the next year.

But I’d like to be clear: I don’t think life is terrible, either. There are times of happiness, moments of love, great senses of achievement, and numerous examples of beauty. It depends where you look, and that is the problem with the words great and terrible: they are subjective. What’s great to some may be terrible to others and vice-versa, making trying to describe life in this way entirely futile. The only way to describe life in its truest form is to look at it objectively: without the bias of our own experiences, the perspective of our own circumstances, or the opinions we hold dear to us.

When we look at life this way, we see it for what it truly is: existence. Atoms colliding, electrons spinning, molecules connecting, and so on. Beautiful panoramas become sunlight reflecting off of objects, times of pain become certain synapses firing in our brain, and our struggles, like our achievements, become inconsequential: they are simply occurrences we put meaning towards in order to better explain our stories. Essentially, great and terrible, good and bad, enjoyable and painful become the same thing: instances where reality is simply interpreted differently.

So what does this mean? Simply put: we have choice. We may not be able to change our struggles, our circumstances, or our barriers, but we can change our perspectives. The way we experience the world is also how we define it, and as such the journey to happiness begins with the heartfelt belief that we’re already there: we need to look at our lives as times of bliss. Every laugh should be a ray of light, every tear a moment of reconcile, and every injury a lesson learned. When things are stripped down to their core, they are just that: things. We decide what impact they have and what importance they hold.

Every sound is music. Every sight is a work of art. Every taste is delicious, every scent is a tantalizing aroma, and every touch is one of meaningful embrace. Life may not be great all the time, and it may at times seem unfair, but one thing is for certain: