Nothing mattered you know? Nothing but the proverbial plate, and me putting too much on it, every day. It was who I was as a person, and nothing could change that, and nothing else mattered; nothing but the plate mattered—overflowing, unending, infinite.
“You look exhausted, man,” they’d tell me. “Yeah, I am,” I’d nod a bit and smile. It didn’t matter if I escaped to the sea or to the mountains or even outer space because the plate would go with me, and before I could stop, it would make itself known. It wasn’t the end of the world. It was much more.
Everything I was happy with, everything I was grateful for, everything I despised, everything I wanted to end—it was all on the plate. I just had too much on it. It wasn’t all bad, just too much, all the time. I couldn’t go through it all, and clearing it only made space for new things.
I learned that life was the proverbial plate and that there was always too much on it. It could never be empty—the plate. And not just for me, it was too much for all of us. That was the beauty of it. The plate was everything in itself. We’d keep braving our way through it trying to clear it, hoping for an empty one when we’re done. We were never done. No one was ever done.
Once we accepted that, though, life got easier. It got simpler once we understood that life was about braving the plate and not about clearing it, that we will always have more on our plates than we wanted, and that someday, the plates would eat us alive.