18 Things Every Person Must Do In Their Lifetime
OCT. 6, 2013 By BRIANNA WIEST
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1. Accept that there will be whole swaths of you that will
always seem like a mystery. There will be things that may never make sense.
There will be questions that may always go unanswered. Despite this, you must
stop questioning the steady sense of knowing your body somehow delivers to you
anyway. Even when logic would seem to defeat it, and your mind is combatting it
furiously. That knowing is your truth. That knowing is what you have to act on
without sound reason. We call this the leap of faith. Learn to take it.
2. Learn what it means to have radical empathy. Realize that
underneath it all we are the same. We have all suffered. We have all known
loss, heartbreak, grief, sadness, tragedy and misfortune, all in the uniqueness
of our own experiences. You may not know what someone’s story is but you do
know what it feels like to have a knife going through you when you lose someone
you love. What it’s like to be completely alone and thwarted from society. You
always have the ability to understand people at that very raw, human level.
It’s only a matter of how much you’re willing to see yourself in them.
3. If you love someone, freaking tell them. Write it on
notes next to their bed and in journals that they’ll one day find and interrupt
their sentences with it if you have to. There is nothing more important than
being vocal about loving someone. You want to know the truth? We are all
starving for love and acceptance and if you love someone you need to tell them
that without being afraid that they don’t love you as much, or at all. That’s
not love. That’s greed. That’s neediness. That’s the desire for affirmation and
attention. Love, in its purest, untapped form, does not hinge on the
requirement that they’ll love you in return.
4. Let loving someone or not loving someone be enough in
deciding whether or not you want to be with them. The rest are augmentable
details. But that core is unchanging.
5. Have a verifiably effective plan for coping with
emotional pain. Sometimes wicked anxiety crops up out of nowhere. Some days
we’ll be just going along our way and then all of a sudden all of the issues of
our childhood come sweeping back through us like we never grew out of them and
we panic and hold onto them because we don’t know how to let go because it
seems like doing so will give them the power to sneak up on us again. In these
moments, you need a friend to call and a shoulder to lean on and a playlist to
blast and a journal to write in. And somewhere in that journal, you need to
have written: “this too shall pass.”
6. Stop trying to convince people to love you. With what you
wear, in sullied comments that dig for their appreciation, in how your
interests have forcefully evolved to complement or mirror those of whom you are
so desperately trying to win over. Stop doing things so you’ll be regarded
highly in other people’s opinions. That won’t make them love you more. It will
only drive you farther away from yourself.
7. Learn to say sorry and mean it. Realize that what most
wisdom stems from is forgiveness: for ourselves, for others, for what happened
and for what’s missing, for what’s unstable and what’s gone unacknowledged.
Realize that you won’t always receive an apology and you still may have to find
forgiveness anyway. Realize that’s the only way to understand just how powerful
a genuine apology can be.
8. Write lists and make goals and always keep yourself
moving toward something. Joy is in the moment, but hope is in tomorrow. It’s a
fine balance that takes lifetimes to perfect. Don’t feel bad if you err toward
one mindset or another. Just don’t forget that when you do fall too deeply into
focusing on today or tomorrow, that you always have the other option.
9. Accept that while most things end up okay, not everything
does. Some things may dig themselves into you and you’ll carry them through
your whole life. Sometimes things go mysteriously unresolved. Sometimes you’ll
fight hard and lose. Sometimes you’ll be so far in denial that acceptance isn’t
something you start to approach for years. It’s important to be okay with not
being okay. It’s part of the human condition. It’s very beautiful if you let it
show you a deeper route into yourself.
10. Stand up for what’s just. Stand up for love and stand up
for equality and respect. Don’t be a bystander in someone else’s life but more
importantly, don’t be a bystander in your own.
11. Let yourself be useless sometimes. You can’t spend your
entire life reveling in achievement. In fact, you’ll spend most of your days on
your knees grappling with what you’re most passionate about. You’ll turn up on
the other side eventually, but not without days upon days of climbing.
12. Say thank you even when you don’t feel gratitude. It’s
not that you shouldn’t feel it, but sometimes you just might not. But saying
“thank you” is one of those rare things in which you do entirely for the other
person. Saying thank you doesn’t help you. It helps the other person want to
give again. You won’t understand what “thank you” means until it’s given to you
after you’ve truly given to someone else. Foster that for other people and keep
the cycle going. It will come back to you eventually.
13. Never go into anything thinking you are entitled to it
because you are talented, because you have suffered for it or because it’s time
for the universe to cater to your needs just this once. This will never be the
truth.
14. Buy a notebook. Write down what you want. Write down
what hurts you. Show it to someone you love. Save it for your children. Burn it
in your backyard. Either way, go to bed knowing that in some way, those things
are out of you.
15. Know the difference between the limits that withhold you
and the limits that are crucial for you to obey. Draw your lines accordingly.
Live your life around them.
16. Learn to comfort someone. Head nods and “I understands”
won’t mean jack shit when someone is really in the depths of something. If you
love someone, know when it’s time to order their favorite food and hold their
hand the way they like and respond in the way they are looking to be responded
to. Sometimes it’s with empathy and understanding, sometimes it’s with problem-solving
mechanisms and jokes to lighten things. You won’t know unless you know someone
thoroughly. There are reasons people don’t just look to anybody when they’re
really in need. These are them.
17. Learn to enjoy talking about something that doesn’t come
at the expense of someone else.
18. Realize how important it is to mourn properly. This
means letting yourself be a whole big ball of effing mess now and again. Things
and people will phase in and out as scheduled. You can’t keep holding on for their
return because most often, they won’t come. But that withholding will shape
you, and it will shape you through your own self-induced pain and suffering. If
you don’t want that to be your story, write it a different way. It starts with
saying goodbye to what’s not meant for us and what’s left inexplicably. Your
quality of life will completely depend on how well you embrace this. Choose
wisely. TC Mark
