Recently my friends Sarah and Dan came up with their 3-4 tiers of existence. The tiers are as follows, from highest to lowest:
1. Thriving
2. Being Young and Doing Things
3. (Persevering)
4. Not-thriving
Most of our friends, including us, are stuck in the being-young-and-doing-things tier, with some slight fluctuation (in my case, often persevering, sometimes not-thriving, striving towards thriving).
Anyway, this is the summer I would like to thrive. I started this weekend by cleaning my entire house and making a big salad. I would imagine the best kind of thriving, however, to be completely uninhibited and spontaneous. Like Stevie Nicks’ Wild Heart.
This is something I am going to explain to my therapist in terms of how I understand my life currently. Amanda, today I am “Being Young and Doing Things”, yesterday I was “Not Thriving”. Most days I am “Thriving” but I think we all know that thriving is not a static feeling, as those little biting bits of “what ifs” or “why am I doing this” can potentially introduce “Not Thriving” into one’s day.
totally not a static thing at all. example: i was thriving today (kind of) until i just looked at my work to-do list. had to cross-out the title “tuesday” and write “wednesday” in its place.
also, this list is from last week’s tuesday. not-thriving with a pinch of persevering.
girls i so can relate to the predominating ideas of this post and your responses. these past few weeks for me have been a teetering ping pong game of the bottom two tiers…mostly not thriving with a sprinkle of perseverance here and there so that i don’t die.
i often think of my current life in terms of what i, as a young adolescent, envisioned my 20′s to be. needless to say it was a far cry from where i am now; i obviously thought i’d be thin and famous and much less noers than how i turned out.
then i think of the future old lady me and how i will look back on what’s supposed to have been the best part of my life (i’ve been putting that off for my 3o’s btw). i so don’t want to think that i wasted that era of skin elasticity and a supposedly better metabolism by getting all stressed out and office bingeing and contracting phone acne on the right side of my face and having to buy bigger clothes.
but the good thing is that we ARE young and we ARE doing things, and that’s just one little step from thriving completely. i have faith that we can absolve ourselves of the big sweeping bouts of noersness and go ahead to actually revel in our youth, aptitude and beauty! then once that happens we are better able to handle that week-old to do list.
PS: this video gives me shivers every time i see it!!
What is thriving though really? Thriving in terms of ourselves? Or thriving for our world/race? Because, in the grand scheme of things, our own thriving doesn’t ~really~ amount to much. I mean, Einstein did some pretty cool stuff, but the human race will inevitably end anyway. I think, technically speaking, we could all sit on our asses and all day every day and the world wouldn’t really change much. And if it did, who’s to say that that change would matter? The world keeps revolving beyond life as we know it (and even if it stops, “time” will continue). Really, do you think that the thrivers and doers were the ones that got off their asses to procreate, and that’s why we’re all so stressed; bent on succeeding and making a name for ourselves? Seriously, though. What is it about this collective need to progress as a race? It doesn’t REALLY get us anywhere closer to being extinction-proof. I really think it’s a bi-product of evolution. At ANY rate, I personally am probably Young and Doing Things with a more-than-is-comfortable dip into the persevering stage. Or it could be that I’m just persevering and am in denial, but that’s probably for the better.