Where I’m Meant to Be

Please do not doubt the absolute magic pill of listening to “Go the Distance” from Hercules because your five-year-old’s borderline obsessed with it and you’re leaned back on the outdoor sofa watching the clouds drag themselves across the sky while the sun outlines the noble spruce trees on the east side of your yard and your dog is plopped beside you doing bear-nose sniff tests of the breeze like she can detect the suspension of time better than you can, and the mourning doves and cardinals and song sparrows are all claiming their respective spots on the birdsong stage while trucks hum softly somewhere off yonder and suddenly your whole body’s like ohhhhhhh I feeeeeeeeel like I belooooooonnnnnng.

Here.

This.

Like, THIS, here, is. the. life.

And I don’t mean that in the “wow nothing could possibly improve this moment” sense because we could definitely add queso and lottery winnings to the mix but I do mean like — THIS is the LIIIIIFE. The actual thing. The living part. The thing we’re all kind of distracted from, like, really seeing. Meanwhile we spend soooo much time trying to make a living that we accidentally miss the blindsidingly obvious fact that the living’s been sittin’ right there in fronta us the entire time like some safe and excruciatingly emotionally available Brian Krakow-type patiently waiting for us to look up from our cortisol-slathered iPhones and our Jordan Catalano-shaped productivity hacks long enough to see that maybe, Angela, if you just stop chasing the breeze for one fleeting sec you can actually feel it against your still embarrassingly young face.

And yeah yeah yeah money IS important because the humans before us basically said “Hey babe you wanna survive?” and now we all gotta show up for this world’s-largest-group-project-slash-long-con that we didn’t technically sign off on but also it is just SO distractingly LOUD compared to the actual point of being alive sometimes. Like the texture-of-the-air, clouds-moving-overhead, Disney-banger-while-your-dog-snorfles-groundhogs-she’ll-never-catch kind of alive.

Because — and I know this is cliché — one day the song will end. Not today, obviously, because the five-year-old demands approximately forty more consecutive repeats, but one day. One day the five-year-old won’t be five anymore. The dog won’t always be melted there beside you in the sun. The trees will most likely outlive us all. The clouds will keep trudgin’ on overhead like they always have.

And I think maybe the great unbearable miracle of being alive is realizing that this was always it — not the somedays or the finallys or the everything’s handled and healed and automated and done — just this weird fleeting little what-day-is-it-again evening with the birds doing what they simply can’t not do and the trucks humming somewhere beyond the trees and the light hittin’ the leaves exactly like this once and never quite this way again and dear god not this song for the twelve. thousandth. time.