it doesn't have to be good to be not bad

okay folks... i've got some groundbreaking shit to share tonight.  i'll go ahead and start with: my mother was right.  there is indeed grey area in life... apparently some of you already know this (and tell me so while smugly smirking behind your glasses after we've just met at a mutual friend's party after i've helped you figure out how to take the battery out of a smoke detector you insist can't be disarmed... but that's allright.  we all have things to work on), but it's news to me.

theme of the week: neutral.

i drew us a diagram.  this makes it true.

all my life my mother has been trying to convince me that there's something between black and white... she calls it grey.  it's actually one of my favorite colors.  I prefer it in charcoal...  but as an experience I don't have much.  i've known she was right ever since i realized she was right about most things in my 20s (actually, I realized she was right about everything in my 20s, it wasn't until my 30s that I backed that down to most things--sorry, ma) but I hadn't experienced enough of it to make it stick.

Somehow, however, (and I'm going to blame mindfulness--yay, mindfulness!) I seem to be living in it.

All week the answer to the "how are you?" or "how is it?" or "how was it?" question starts to come out as "good" but then backs down to a more authentic feeling... "it just was."  Which seems to require clarification, because whether all y'all have known about this mysterious grey area longer than I have or not--for the most part, we (yes, we) don't live in it.  A lot of things I experience aren't good...  but that doesn't make them bad.  Something doesn't have to be good to be not bad.

I know, it's deep... take it in.  I'll repeat:  something doesn't have to be good to be not bad.

if bad is over here on the left (see diagram) and good is over here on the right... there's a whole fucking arc of otherness in between!  and it's always been there!  ack!  mindblowing!

Just because I experience something doesn't mean that I need to make a decision about it... it can just exist and I can exist too and we can just exist.

woah.