Digging Deeper: The Secret Messages of life Hidden Around Us
The best things in life come to us when we aren’t looking. So it happened with the below quote from Louise Erdrich, which sent my mind reeling with such efficacy that I have now determined to taste as many apples as I can. This of course, is mostly metaphoric.
By the time I was 16, I had been told (a handful of times by a handful of people) that life isn’t easy, so just accept it and try to do your best. But what about when you’re paralyzed with fear, and have no idea what to do? What about when you need a plan, but you don’t even have a pencil? Nobody prepares you for this. Luckily though, I made a discovery once, while on my way to find a pencil.
What I discovered was that the answers to life are all in the woodwork, right in front of you, woven into the wallpaper. They are all there–coexisting with fear and anxiety, in between the breakfast you didn’t have, and the coffee you drank just before midnight. But surely nobody drinks coffee that late though…right? Maybe they don’t, but sometimes I do. And to tell you the truth, the coffee probably had something to do with what I saw in the woodwork, and all the questions I had afterwards.
Like for example, what if you could just eat a whole bunch of apples and everything would be okay?
The question seems random, but what I took from my discovery was that life is about the union of pain, pleasure, storm, and sunshine. I found myself alarmed and mesmerized as I pictured polar opposites complimenting each other with impossible harmony and perfection. I found out that even apples are bitter before they become sweet. The lesson?
Take your heartbreak, and run. Go and taste the apples; read the book you’ve always been curious about, climb that mountain, believe in yourself, take the chances that deep down you know you want to take. This is what she means: you are here…to live.
The quote:
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It’s the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
–Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Find the book below:
