Daily Dose: Dear baby

Dear baby,

Welcome. This is the Earth. It’s a big, big place with little, little people. I’m on it. And now so are you.

None of this makes sense to you, of course. Right now you’re just a rubbery jumble of Jello wrapped up in human flesh. What else can I expect from you besides the occasional burp and belch and bumbling bellow?

Don’t think of that as an insult, baby. It isn’t. Most of the time, I can’t understand these words myself. Imagine that. I look back on these clunky sentences like tombstones and I wonder who the heck wrote all this because I definitely wouldn’t. I’d be more careful, more caring, and less self-indulgent. There would be flow. No fragments. Things wouldn’t run on and on and on and I’d ensure that in each sentence, from the first to the last to every awkward middle bit, I’d be less exhausting. And I wouldn’t bridge my thoughts with worn colloquialisms like and so on.

And so on.

One day you’ll have these thoughts of inadequacies too, baby. It’s inevitable. You see – this is a funny circle you have plopped yourself onto. We don’t know much about much despite waffling around for some thousand of years. Of course, we don’t admit this to anyone, ourselves included. Though we’re wrong more often than we’re right, and we’re probably wrong about that too, we live every day as though we were a godsend. The world is our oyster and goddammit if we aren’t the shining pearl at the center.

But this, baby, is wrong. Know this. Besides that some are allergic to shellfish, we’re all pretty much the same, no one person better than the other, and we’re all just sifting around trying to make sense of the world. Some of us are better than others. Some of us have opportunities to do so that others don’t have. And some of us forget that we have either.

That leads me to the one truth that I have learned, baby. It isn’t much, but it’s enough. In fact, it’s all we have after everything.

Try. Really – that’s it. Try, try, try in that order. Again and again and again, get up, do your best, and see what happens. Even if you fail. Especially if you do.

Because if you do else wise, you’re going to keep moving, doing, and wearing hats like you always do, and you’re life is going to clop, clop, clop away, and then you’re going to wake up and maybe you’re thirty which is eons away for you now, baby, and maybe you’re eating cereal and you’re wondering where time went and what did you do with it and you’re going to look back and see a place tickled by sunshine, a place where you used to be happy. You’ll ask yourself if that place is still like that, all rosy and beautiful, but then you’ll recall with a laugh that you aren’t like that anymore and the swing is too small and the jungle-gym is actually a man-made construction and you forgot how to fly a kite. The cereal will be soggy by the end of it.

But you still have a lifetime left to live, baby. Don’t get bogged down. Make mistakes. Have success. And do both as much or as little as you want to do. You, and only you, make your fate. It's yours after all.

And don’t listen to people telling you otherwise. Especially to people who give you advice. They know nothing.

Warm regards,

Kacper