Every Joy is a Promise of Sorrow

So lean in

This is my cat.

His name is Mouse. He is over eighteen years old and riddled with arthritis. This week the inevitable kidney failure has finally started to show on his bloodwork. He’s lost a full pound of weight this year. He has walked in slow, crooked paths for a couple years now. He stares vacantly off into the middle distance for long stretches of time — we call this “buffering.”

Mouse loves to sit in the sunshine on the back porch. His old ass will run to the door when I am going to sit out there for lunch. He loves to curl up under the covers of beds sitting in sunshine too. He demands to be picked up on my shoulder so he can lick the side of my face. He follows me and Spouse around the house, and drags his crooked ass up the stairs to my office. He is sitting on my lap, right now, as I write this. He is devoted to us, and we are devoted to him. Dutifully taking him to get arthritis shots, checking the covers before we sit on a bed, and getting scratched when we argue with him about going back inside. He’s living his best fucking life.

But sorrow is on the horizon.

The Promise

Everything that brings you joy will end.

Entropy is a cold-hearted bitch and it always wins.

Impermanence is central to almost all philosophies and religions in the world.

“Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. Or that everything was born to die.”

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

So the sorrow isn’t a question of “if” but instead is a question of “when.” Mouse’s journey will come to an end, and all that remains is to know the point in time.

Well, that and living his best fucking life.

Lean the Fuck In

I like that term — “lean in.” I’ve been hearing it a bunch at work right now, like one of those things that you start realizing is popping up and making the rounds everywhere you look. Boss says it, coworker says it, the fucking news says, and I’m reading it on Reddit. It’s everywhere in my world right now. Lean in.

At work right now I am actively planning the destruction of most of the things I’ve created over the past couple years. It’s an interesting aspect of my job - I create things that I frequently have to kill. I had a mentor once comment on it actually and it sank into the swamp that is my head. I had created a simple solution to a problem over a couple weeks of time. It was a great little elegant solution that could easily be understood and supported by my team. But my mentor had discovered a better solution that we could simply purchase. Fuller features, more supportable, one less thing on my overflowing plate, and one more thing that anybody could pick up if I got hit by a bus.

So we killed it. Took it out behind the woodshed, put it out of its misery. I even got to be the one to flip the switch. “You know, you’re more okay with this than I expected given you built this whole thing a couple months ago and I know you had lots of fun doing it.”

I had indeed. The joy of a useful new solution and getting to be fully creative was a thrill. I had leaned the fuck in, which is when I do my best work. But it was always going to die. The sorrow was promised before I wrote the first line of code. It’s been well over half a decade, but I believe the solution that replaced mine is still being used. It, too, will die one day along with the company that has the solution.

Impermanence

It strikes me as a little odd to have jumped from a beloved pet who is in the twilight of his life into some stupid work shit, but I like the illustration of the universality. Sorrow follows joy in life, just like joy can follow sorrow. You form joyful friendships only to see them fade sometimes to be followed by new friends and new joys. I’m deep into a book hangover right now after finishing the last Dungeon Crawler Carl book, and deep into a game hangover because I finished Saros. Soon enough though I’ll find another book and another game.

Or I suppose I could stop looking, right?

I could never get another cat too. Stop making friends once the friendships fade away.

Avoid the sorrow by just…avoiding the joy.

It doesn’t appeal. I recognize the risk and the surety that sorrow will eventually come. I knew the day Mouse snuggled up on my shoulder and instantly got picked over the rest of his litter that the greatest likelihood was that down the road I would hold him on my shoulder for the last time before he reached the end. I can only hope that when that day comes he will pass right there in the same spot we started it all so many years ago.

But until then we’ll just keep living our best fucking lives in the present. Sit in the sunshine. Fight about when it’s time to go back inside. And cuddle.

Because the joy is worth the sorrow and it always has been.

Squirt Says…

I like how you switch between Mouse and your job. It shows that no matter what it is, it is constant. You can't have one or the other; they simply coexist or do not exist at all.