Miss me? Sorry, I've been doing all my blogging on good old fashioned paper for the past few months, but I'm back now and boy do I have a huge revelation (thanks in part to Lilo and Stitch as well as the homecoming theme this year).
So you know how people always describe events as a roller coaster ride? Some go as far as to say that life is one big roller coaster ride? Well I completely agree with those people, but for more than just the obvious "life has ups and downs". The metaphor is way more than that, it delves deeper into the experience of riding a roller coaster.
Yes, a roller coaster goes up and down. That's pretty easy to relate to life; throughout your life there are good moments and bad ones of the like. You don't really notice yourself go up though, or at least I don't. It's a slow rise and, if you're actually noticing it instead of talking with the person next to you, the entire time you're just worrying about the inevitable descent. The only time you really grasp how high up you were is as you're plummeting towards the ground. You don't notice all the great times in your life, they hide themselves as mundane events, until things start going wrong. You don't realize how good you had it because you were so aware that something unpleasant was someday going to happen. So there's the rise of the elevator. The fall is also pretty accurate. You drop at ungodly speeds and just when you think you're about to die, you're suddenly facing upright again. Something can seem like the worst thing in the world and sometimes it feels as though you're never going to get out of the fog, and then you realize that life keeps going and it's not the end.
Roller coasters are terrifying, there is no denying that. Life is terrifying, there is definitely no denying that. And yet a roller coaster with no descent, life with nothing bad ever happening, doesn't sound like an enjoyable ride. The fear, the excitement, the possibilities, the negative and the positive, these are the things that make life worth living.
