Existence is a fight to the death

And you are already dead if give up even an ounce of ground to Fate

The cold is a bitter reminder of death; the polar opposite of vibrant growth and vitality. Frozen wind steals your comfort, the chill slows your blood, and frost withers away the food that sustains you. The black vacuum of space is mostly a heatless, dark, emptiness. Cold, and the veiled threat of death that it signals, is a practice round for waits for us in the grave.

I hate the cold.

I detest the death of every year, the annual reset blanketed in snow and greyness. I will not go gently into that good night. I will rage, rage against the dying of the light. I cannot control the weather, but I refuse to let Old Man Winter steal away what I am owed. Life is my birthright. Vitality is my weapon. I will not give up what is mine without a fight.

The fight will never occur on your chosen battlefield

Geographically, the cold is an inevitability for me. Living in Boulder, Colorado, next to a mountain and 30 minutes from a ski resort, mounds of snow will find their way to my doorstep. There will be no avoiding what I so vehemently dislike, and every day draws me nearer. This gives me a very clear decision:

Live with resentment and bitterness brought on by the situation that I consciously put myself in, or adapt. I cannot shift the weather around me, so I am left only with adaptation of myself. Adaptation beyond warmer clothes and higher heating bills, which only serve to create a bubble of comfort, a sacred boundary of heat that can yet be crossed. No, that is not enough. I will adapt myself completely.

I will learn to love the cold.

I speak often about how perspective and choice sets the rules for every situation, and it’s high time to put my actions where my mouth is. You and I both have complete autonomy over our lived experiences. You can actively choose to make your life whatever you desire it to be. More often than not, you are not at the mercy of other forces, and you can shape your life as you wish. Anything else is an excuse.

The minute you are born, you are given a burden only removed upon death, the burden of a soul in a free body. The price you pay for your soul is the weight of responsibility. You are responsible for every single day of your own life, and limited only by knowledge and physical age. Let this narrative about the cold serve as an example on how to handle the burden, but realize that when overlayed onto any other problem in your own life, the answer is the same. Substitute cold for your own challenge and continue. Gauge the situation, map the paths forward, choose how to act and choose how to react. The decision, and thus the consequences, are yours alone.

It’s common to feel at some point that the universe derives some sort of sick pleasure from finding ways to piss in our individual bowl of cereal, as if our current life was nothing but a jail sentence carried over from the sins of a past life, and we exist only to pay a debt. Which may be true, that I don’t know. But I do know that the guy who comes after me in the reincarnation cycle is going to have real hell to pay, because I refuse to take what the universe offers without trying to bite its fingers as it hands it down.

Regardless of any situation of cosmic misfortune, I have control over my mind, as do you. Any situation we are living through is nothing but a combination of factors that in isolation only exist. They don’t mean anything other than what we assign to them and what others assign to them. Problems are only problems if labeled as problems. All of the factors are naught but a jumbled-up pile of letters and we choose to put them together to bring forth the words that give them significance. In constructing those words, you write the story, and thus the narrative arc of your life.

The only reason you cannot proclaim your bills to just be a number (and thus not a real thing to you) is because the same numbers are differently assigned by your electricity provider to be an indicator of debt, and frankly they have more power than you in winning that battle. If you had more power than the electricity company, you could ignore them. So the situation gives you a number, and you get to decide how much of a problem it is, if it is one at all. You do have the freedom to modify that debt, to make it skyrocket or go to zero. You could change providers, you could switch to gas, you could move away, or even sue the company for unfair rates. You also have the choice to be grateful for the utilities, to decide that it is not a burden, it is the price of chosen comfort, and a consequence of your life decisions.

You are both the author and the actor, and to be anything less is a premature death. It is letting the game continue on autopilot while you idly sit there and watch. To manifest a rich, full life, you must be in control.

I have chosen every step on the path that has led me to Boulder, and every result is mine to own. Thus, my next step could easily be one of frustration and impatience as I try to rush the sands of time through my existential hourglass, ticking down days until things are ‘good’ again in the spring. Or I can have good right now, this very second, and every day of winter.

As I bike to work in 25-degree weather, I will relish in the pain throbbing in my hands as the wind cuts over my tight grip on the handlebars, forming bleeding cracks in my knuckles. I choose to see it as myself shedding blood for my choices, for the deep gratitude for the freedom and autonomy to have made them. Choice is life. Those tingling needles in my frozen fists are a physical offering to the altar of a moment in time. Of a time when I am 33 years old, building a company, physically active enough to bike over hills, and in a space where I enjoy both myself and my life. That offering is made with a smile.

Lay your offerings to Father Winter

I will choose to love the cold, because choice is life and life is intention. You must also choose to transform your burdens.

Daily tasks will move slower as time is taken to bundle before every journey outside and roads close down to icy conditions. Boundaries are placed on options for spending the days. There is no longer swimming in a lake, but there is skiing down a mountain. There are less occasions for ice cream, but more for soup. Life goes on, and no hourglass sand will be rushed.

So too does this symbology carry over to death. The third decade of life is the culmination of Endless Youthful Summer, mirroring the transition of the year. Young enough to have hot blood, but old enough to remember when it was boiling. A long way yet to go to the grave, but crystal-clear memories of what has passed, and grief of what will never be returned to. We must not dread what is left because it does not shine like what has passed. Relish every stage.

We will rage. We will stand to choose and fight against the gasping, sputtering, dying of the light. We will grab it by the neck and force it to remain above the horizon for as long as our grip has strength, and start a fire in the dark after it has sunk beyond our reach.

If you are struggling, suffering, drowning, you must re-imagine yourself. You are staring down a fork of existence, and you must choose whether to succumb or seize the reins.

If you are addicted to drugs, choose the hard battle of withdrawals and mark every ounce of pain as a sacrifice to your future self and debt to your past self for wasting your bodily grace. If you have lost a loved one, mark it as a chance to grieve and be deeply influenced by their existence in ways that only absence can bring. If you have Stage 4 terminal cancer, love your body for its valiant efforts, accept that your life is short, unfair, and tragic, then elect to spend every waking second left in awe of what it means to be alive, with an intensity that you could never have mustered without staring down the barrel of a proverbial gun. Choose to live, even when Lady Fortuna has chosen you to die. As long as you pull breath into your lungs, you have one more second of immeasurable depth to assign meaning to.

Tragedy will happen. You will die, I will die, everyone we love will die. I will not spend a second of it begging for the universe to hear my pleas for fairness, to wish for what has not come to pass.

Instead, I will rage. I will wield my birthright of vitality to bring choice to every impasse. Short or long, tragic or bountiful, I alone will direct the flow of the water as it carves the canyons of my existence.

Choose to be good, to do good, and to inspire good, on your own terms. Every situation is just a bubbling mess of factors to pull a narrative from that gives meaning to time on earth. A vector of energy that came from the stars and will return to the ground, which can be consciously spent to create positive impact in that short space between phases.

You must make the effort. Meet tragedy with deep gratitude and meaning. Find joy and control in the bitter cold. Never let yourself dip further than your ankle into the tar pit of self-pity. If you are breathing, you have autonomy, and you alone make your existence worthwhile.

If the universe wants the light to die, it had better come with the intention to kill. Shoulder your burden and strengthen your resolve against tragedy. Seize responsibility with gratitude, as every result or consequence is a chorus singing hymnals to our autonomy. Manifest the reality you desire and when the universe raises its fist, be prepared to fight.

Rage against the shared tragedy of temporary existence. Rage against the unforeseeable pivots of fortune. Rage against the dying of the light by becoming the light.

With love from me to you,

Alec

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.