"And I know, baby, just how you feel
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real"
- Jump, Van Halen
Time to go over some more phrases that I say to myself fairly often! Woohoo!
• If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people.
In the movie The Last Jedi, a tiny alien crawls across a table and cryptically says this to a former stormtrooper. Is that relevant to this post? Not really, but I figured it would be nice to give some context before I dive in.
I've found that people's eyes often tell me a lot about them before I even get to know them. When I meet people, I tend to scan their face for clues about their personality and character. Even when I talk to people, I'm subconsciously scrutinizing them for information. Now that I think about it, it's kind of a weird habit, isn't it?
Anyway, I've found that pretty much anyone I meet today tends to be variably similar to someone I've met in the past - a matching pattern, if you will. People in college remind me of people from high school. I compared people in high school to people from middle school. People in middle school were like people in elementary school, but worse!! You get the idea.
Now, to say that I've encountered every possible personality pattern would be a gross exaggeration. It's dang near impossible to meet every type of person in one lifetime. But you can get pretty darn close.
We humans aren't able to live nearly as long as Maz Kanata (not yet, anyway). But eventually, you get to the point where you meet a person and you think "oh yeah, I know exactly what you're like". (Side note: stereotyping is different and also bad. Don't stereotype!!) And it gets kind of tedious, feeling like you never meet anyone "new".
Then again, sometimes you meet someone who is unlike anyone you've met before. Sometimes, you meet someone with new eyes. And life itself becomes a little bit more exciting because of it.
• Roll with the punches.
In catchphrasing pt. 2, I talk about why I hate the saying about lemons and lemonade. This saying is pretty similar, but with a pretty crucial difference. See, the other saying implies that bad situations can be salvaged. That you can make life sugary-sweet by putting in a little bit of elbow grease. Anyone who has been alive for longer than, say, two or three seconds knows that such a sentiment is patently false. In life, one comes across events that are so catastrophically terrible that the concept of making lemonade wouldn't even cross one's mind.
This brings us back to the phrase "roll with the punches". I think punches accurately describe how life treats people sometimes. Sometimes, personal experiences are so excruciating that they're comparable to actual physical pain. Life will hit you and there's nothing that you can do about it. Make lemonade? Shut the frick up. The best you can do is damage control. Mitigate the pain. The goal is not to end the suffering, it's to lessen the suffering as much as possible.
I'd like to think that I've gotten pretty good at rolling with the punches - figuratively, of course. If someone actually punched me it would hurt. A lot.
So, I tend to expect the worst. I convince myself that there are gonna be a lot of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days. I tell myself that life itself is out to get me, because that's how it feels 95% of the time.
But I sure as heck am gonna keep blocking those hits.
• You learn something new every day.
In catchphrasing pt. 3, I mentioned that "there's a lesson to be learned in any situation". That particular saying slightly implies that those situations have to be negative to impart wisdom.
This phrase, however, has a bit of a more positive spin to it. When you go to class, you can learn something! When you go to the museum, you can learn something! When you discuss credit scores with your friends at the pizzeria, you can learn something!
Side note: what the frick is a credit score? Maybe I need to learn something new...
Like I've mentioned before, I believe the buildup of knowledge brings us closer to knowing what life itself is all about. Each day brings us closer to finally understanding the world - as much as we'd like to think we understand the world, we really frickin' don't. So we keep on living and learning, day by day.
Fun fact: did you know the bit of plastic at the end of your shoelace is called an "aglet"? If you didn't, well, you learn something new every day! If you did... well, there's always tomorrow.
