Life as material

One glorious chance to learn

Aleksey Vaynshteyn

Ideas came to me when I was walking on uneven roads, and they didn't care if I tripped and fell. 

Separating the living and loving was futile here - they would come when they wanted, grazing a train of thought with a concept, synthesizing, processing, a CPU of one’s genesis and arriving, stubbornly enough, when I was walking, especially with muddy shoes. Which is to say: it only matters that I wrote them down then, or they would have wisped themselves away - burning into ash, disappearing into the rocks and sand and stone, leaving my mind and heart emptier for it. 

These are words tainted by the labor of the day, and I am no less of a writer for not doing this full time. I wonder why life must inform my art, but then realize that learning how to live is perhaps the central task we are born to do. As some of the best teachers of the trade (martha beck, elizabeth gilbert, pema chodron, byron katie, the list goes on) say, this is earth school. This is earth school, and we must learn, or we must desire and suffer, suffer and desire. 

In hotel rooms that I imagine escaping to with whiskey glasses and fresh oranges and a Swiss knife for emergencies, Phoebe Bridgers is playing, and then Death Cab for Cutie, and my days and nights are laced with the same kind of remorse that my writing is. I made so few mistakes and still ended up here. I tried to do everything right and still paid my dues for what you did. I gave you chances long after it kept making sense. 

I think the bigger question I was asking myself through the music and the earth school and the muddy walks was- how did I get here? How does one find themselves at this juncture where you pay for all your sins and there is godly mercy but not human one? Things could be worse, yes, but they could also be better. There could be more parties, more clinking of glasses, more easily forgotten sorrows, fewer catastrophes, fewer things that weigh on the soul.

On a bus ride to a sports match under the influence of a beer buzz, I serve up things with an honesty that only comes under the circumstances. I write down: worthy questions, worthy pivots, driven headfirst to futile ends. 

Other teachers I love (english professors, taylor swift, eve babitz, lana del rey) taught me that in this world, boys are just collateral damage to good art. Even on your worst day, you can make art about it, and that is the real romance of a lifetime. Heartbreak is just collateral damage to good art.

Life is material, even when mistakes are made carelessly, even when you stink of them, even when the existentialism hits you full force. Life is material because it is just school, and between fresh oranges and glasses full of whiskey and a swiss knife for emergencies, you figure it out. 

Life is meaningful and meaningless and you figure it out.