Live and Let live

Look for joy, but understand: without death and suffering, our life would not have a meaning -Paulo Coelho


I feel like a brick has been lodged on to my chest. It gets heavier and lighter, but it feels branded upon my chest. I carried it with me at the funeral. I tried to breathe around it before recognizing it for what it is. Greif. Maybe that's why when we're hurting, we instinctively want someone we love to put their arms around us. It's as if pressing that someone against our hearts would staunch the bleeding. Right now, I'm anticipating seeing my younger cousins later. I feel an overwhelming need to lose myself in younger kids' carefree joy and freedom.
I keep thinking about life and how it gets in the way of things. I'm more conscious of that having so many of my friends still in university while I'm past that. You start to become more forgiving of people who promise to keep in touch but do so less and less as days go by. You start to forgive people who talk to you less and less because they have less in common with you. Saying Good morning to someone every day suddenly doesn’t seem as important as it used to. What does matter, instead, is going through life with that love, friendship still intact, so much that you carry it with you. Your heart feels attuned to those friends, like planets circling in the same orbit. Every planet has a path, but their still drawn to one another. When life finally clears away, you slip into that familiarity and friendship gladly as if no time has passed, even though you both maybe at very different stages in your lives. It does matter that no matter how much time has passed you can laugh or cry with that friend.
No one is perfect. We all let resentments and grudges build up without taking the time to air them out and talk them through. We all let them fester until they become putrid and awful. I'm no better. I forgive because in forgiveness you let go of all that gnaws inside you, but God forgive me, sometimes forgiveness is beyond me. I realize that nobody is worth hatred. I can still feel bad for a person who is no longer in my life, without actually wanting them in it. There are also those people who just leave a bad aftertaste so much that you visibly wince whenever their brought up. It's terrible because life is too short not to let go off things that fester, but at the same time we're only human. We all do the best we can. We all struggle to be the best person we can be. We all try to be better than the person we were the day before. We all hope that tomorrow brings more wisdom. We all promise ourselves that we won't let the mistakes of our past seep into our future, but color them in a better way.
My aunt was telling my mother and me about a lecture she heard on the radio where the presenter said that pain is beautiful and that it brings goodness. She urged listeners to think about it because when we feel pain, we all try to find out why. Knowing where the pain is helps narrow down something enough for a doctor to heal it. Why is pain considered such a negative when it can bring about such goodness and healing? There is meaning in everything around us, even the things we care for the least. We should find meaning in death, suffering, and grief. We should rise above our own misery and try to find joy and blessings.
I'm waxing philosophical but I truly don't want to dwell on grief. I want to teach my 2 year old cousin nursery rhymes, sing along, and watch her giggle at hand movements. I want to play Cops and Robbers with the Mini cousins and run along even if I am the eldest cousin. I want to lose myself being alive. Maybe breathing in the scent of shampoo in a child's hair or hearing excited shrieks and laughter will dislodge the brick on my chest. There is life to be lived. I just hope I live it the right way. I hope I live and let live. I hope I forgive more, laugh more, and I hope that peace of mind and happiness finds those I love more than anything in the world.