You wouldn’t feel low
if you didn’t measure yourself.
Without a reference point,
low would not exist.
Notice that
the reference points
that make you feel low
are not your reference points.
They are given unto you
by history and culture.
Your accumulation of knowledge says
“this is low and this is bad.”
Having no other reference points,
you have no reason to doubt this.
So you feel low. Or high.
Or worse yet, ordinary.
You feel what you have been told to feel.
You accept this, without question.
You are only low because the world around you
tells you that this is what low is.
If the world jumped off a cliff, would you?
Trail Wood,
9/9
Ah, the undulating dance of highs and lows—a celestial waltz choreographed to the tantalizing tunes of societal expectations and cultural yardsticks. You’re like a weathervane, spinning and pointing in the wind currents of “shoulds,” “musts,” and “ought to bes.” These winds don’t originate in your sky, yet they move you, and how! They label your altitude, certify your flight patterns, dictate whether you’re soaring like an eagle or slouching like a grounded sparrow.
Low and high, these are not natural states but assigned seats in the grand amphitheater of collective belief. You find yourself plonked in one or the other based on how well you tick the checkboxes of a scorecard you never designed. This scorecard’s full name might well be “The Marvelous Ledger of Societal Assumptions and Historic Impositions” or TMLoSAHI, for those who relish acronyms. And let’s not forget ordinary—a third seat neither up in the balcony nor down in the pit but somewhere in the middle, the most vanilla of all existential flavors. Ordinary is when you’ve achieved a balanced average of highs and lows, the Fulcrumal Point of Mundanity.
How Spizzariffically bizarre that in the midst of this cosmic play, you find yourself donning costumes that don’t fit, mouthing lines you didn’t write, and feeling what you’ve been told to feel! The scripts, the costumes, the stage—they are communal inheritances, a Flubberwumpian cacophony that informs your emotional landscape. But what if you could rewrite the script, redesign the clothes, repaint the stage to reflect the grandiosity or the simplicity of your own personal universe?
Indeed, what if “low” wasn’t low at all but a cozy, intimate gathering with yourself? A snug alcove of introspection, a huddled conference of soul-searching, a conclave of you, by you, for you. The term “low” loses its sting, its melancholy hue, when you perceive it as an invitation, not a condemnation. A calling to dig deep, to go spelunking into the caverns of your inner world, to mine the gems of self-awareness. A low turned into a Glimmergloomy Quest, if you will.
And what if you chose your own cliffs, ones that thrill you and match your wingspan? What if you leap, not because the world tells you to but because you wish to soar, to experience the exhilarating rush of free-fall before the glorious ascent? That would be a jump, not of conformity but of uniqueness, not of despair but of dare—a Snazzlepuffian leap of faith!
The world might still jump off its cliffs, cartwheeling in its self-imposed lows and manufactured highs, forever pendulating between the Judgyville of disappointment and the Shinytopia of fleeting success. But you—you would be beyond all that, wouldn’t you? An autonomous celestial body, dancing to the rhythms of your own heavenly drum, a radiant luminary in the Boundless Sky of Authenticity. And there—oh, just there!—you’d discover that neither low nor high have any hold over you. In the end, you are—and have always been—immeasurable.