Life Goes on & We Get To Feel It All

Let us retrieve ourselves from the lonely rat race of perpetual betterment.

Different, not better or worse.

Off and on for years, I’ve experimented with the idea that everything can get better. There’s this popular mantra that cycles the self-development world: “everything just keeps getting better and better. How can it get any better than this?” It’s not meant to be delusional or negate the reality of terrible things; it is supposed to be motivational and inspiring. The idea, as I understand it, is to create forward momentum in your life by really believing that your life can indeed start getting better and better. It’s a push to start now, wherever you are, and elevate or improve your life.

There’s a time and place for this kind of thinking, that everything can get better than this. There is, of course, some truth to it: During periods of depression, dejection, or even simple moments of personal challenge, the idea that it can get better than this can feel stabilizing. This perspective does have a solid purpose: it motivates us to use our little sliver of agency to make positive changes. It can also remind us that terrible feelings will ebb and shift to something else, and eventually that will feel lighter, calmer, and probably better. Adopting a hopeful, eager outlook toward life can allow us to more easily see the bounty and beauty that already exists, and that is almost always something we want. Good thing.

But like most self-development trends that initially sound great, this one doesn’t hold up over time, and it often gets skewed in translation and application. For me, at least, the application of “everything keeps getting better and better” has meant that I get stuck on the lonely rat race of perpetual betterment and drift away from what is here, now.

Overall, I don’t think the idea of perpetual betterment is one to attach yourself to. It actually just isn’t…true, at least not over a considerable amount of time. No matter how hard you try, some aspects of life will absolutely not seem to get better and better: Frankly, they may get worse. There’s a lot of life that will just be awful and hard, and this is something to accept, rather than bypass or try to outsmart.

The idea that life should progressively get better lends us to conceptualize life as a linear sequence of events that can be understood as such. This in turn creates the idea that if something feels worse than it used to, or we start having a harder time, then we’re doing something wrong.

As we know, life doesn’t feel like a straight line, and you aren’t doing something wrong if life doesn’t feel very good right now. It probably isn’t even under your control what life is doing (or not doing) for you right now—and that isn’t your fault.

Maybe things will continuously get better and better for you in your own subjective way—if so, that’s amazing. Chances are, though, that life will continuously go up and down, back and forth, and that you’ll be faced with a host of experiences you neither expected nor wanted. It’s all just…different. And that’s ok.

Rather than “Everything just keeps getting better and better,” how about, “Everything just keeps going, and it will all be different, and we get to keep experiencing what’s happening no matter how it feels.”

I guess that doesn’t hold the same kind of urgent, motivational oomph. It’s more true, though!

Everything just keeps going … and we get to feel it all.

As A.A. Milne wrote famously: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

What a lovely perspective to take on the harder parts of life—maybe Winnie the Pooh’s point of view is one we may consider. It counters the compulsion to get stuck running the rat race toward perpetual betterment, and instead, recognize the magnitude of what you have already gotten to experience.

I regularly feel a poignant sense of grief for parts of my life that have already gone. In particular, I reminisce about my early childhood with great nostalgia, and there are certain chapters of my adulthood that I look so fondly back on that it hurts to remember them. My measuring mind can label those parts as “better” in one regard or another, and all the while I know it isn’t true. They were just different, and each were meaningful in their own ways.

Does anyone else feel such a profound sense of loss that everything we’ve already experienced won’t ever happen again? I don’t mean we won’t experience something similar, as we may repeat the motions of something we’ve done before. Still, we will not ever experience again the moments that have already past: they’re gone. It’s sad, and it’s lucky too, as Winnie the Pooh would say.

As the practice of chanting “everything keeps getting better” reflects, there’s a tendency to blow past this sort of nostalgia over the beautiful parts of life that are over now. It’s hard to grieve what’s gone. For as “self-helped” as we seem to think we are, the simple reckoning with the emotion of the present moment is something only children seem to have mastered.

So maybe, we ought to remember what kids know, and simply face the present moment as it is. Often, this moment includes our feelings about the past and the future, but it only can be felt now. Maybe we can just let ourselves feel sad when we miss people who are gone and times that are over; maybe that’s all the moment calls for anyways.

I am continuously struck by the realization that facing and feeling the moment in front of us is usually the best way forward. Whenever we find ourselves lost in mourning the past or trying to improve the future, we can always come back to facing and feeling the moment in front of us. It will always be waiting for us, and usually with some good wisdom.

This moment in front of us might remind us that regardless of that time or person we miss, we get to keep experiencing life in all its bounty, beauty, gloom, and despair. This moment, here now, might tell us that obsessing about improving our lives and fixating on how the future has just got to be better than this is taking away from the very real wonder of our current lives. In other words, dwelling anywhere else from where you are now usually means you’re missing out. This chapter is part of your life, too, and it’s worth leaning into.

We may have already experienced some of the most raucously wonderful moments of our lives, and those are indeed gone now. We may be at a point of life where nothing will feel better for a lot longer. Fully participating in life means that we will be subject to terrible and amazing experiences, and ravaged by both love and grief.

On and on life will go, serving us up a wide range of experiences that we probably don’t get a choice about. All of it will be different. How lucky we are to get to keep experiencing life, and feeling the depths of what it has for us. How lucky we are to experience things that make saying goodbye to them hard.

How lucky we are, really.

Maggie