To John Mayer With Love

I wish that when I was younger, I could have met my cur­rent self. We would have sat down at a cof­fee shop so that I could explain life to young me in terms that only we would under­stand. It would have saved me a lot of hardship.

You can lis­ten to all the sage wis­dom you want, but things only make sense when you can explain them to your­self in your own words. For instance, I’ve been told for three years that Break­ing Bad is the best show on tele­vi­sion, but only after I watched it was I able to tell myself why every­one was right. Other truths I know now that I can explain them: that I’m not miss­ing any cru­cial infor­ma­tion and that poker really isn’t all that fun; that heart­breaks do fade but they take about a year longer than you expect and by the time they do you really don’t care about it enough to notice; and above all else, life is sim­pler than you think.

I used to think that life was an intri­cate series of levers and pul­leys, but­tons and switches, Mex­i­can stand­offs and hostage nego­ti­a­tions. As I get older I real­ize that life is more Nether­lands min­i­mal­ist than Jack­son Pol­lock. The prob­lems don’t get fewer, and in fact they grow in num­ber, but the way I index them in the data­base is dif­fer­ent. More prob­lems get filed under fewer cat­e­gory headers.

Things are get­ting sim­pler, and it’s mak­ing life bet­ter. Here’s the cheat sheet:

Peo­ple want to be liked. We all crave atten­tion and affec­tion and we all reject shame. When we get embar­rassed we send a thug ver­sion of our­selves to the fore­front to do our fight­ing for us. We don’t want to be in a rela­tion­ship to hear the words “I love you,” we want to be in a rela­tion­ship to say the words “I love you.” We want to feel needed, and excep­tional. We want to ace a hear­ing test. We are binary crea­tures; if we’re the plain­tiff, we want to win every dol­lar. If we’re the defen­dant, we want to guard every penny. We want to make more money than last year. We don’t want to get can­cer or die in our cars and we want the same for our loved ones. We will mourn the death of strangers while secretly appre­ci­at­ing it wasn’t some­one we knew. We go out on week­ends to have sex while avoid­ing get­ting punched in the face. We drink so we can be our­selves and not mind it. We’re des­per­ate to be under­stood. We want to know some­one else has felt it, too. We want to make the per­son we heard wasn’t all that into us change their minds about us and admit they had us wrong.

We want sunny skies, but with a chance of killer tor­na­does, just to keep music sound­ing good. We take hours upon hours to admit to self con­scious­ness. We don’t know exactly how to plea­sure each other. We just want love. In any and every form.

See? It’s sim­ple. :)

These words by John were orig­i­nally posted on his blog: ONE FORTY PLUS (Pic­ture added by ME.)