Three different topics have been on my mind today. I am not sure if they’re all related, or how, or if it’s just random. I’ll lay them out as best I can and let you decide.
- The very thing you may be berating somebody else for not doing could be something they learned not to do in order to avoid being berated in a different environment.
- Life without death is not a life worth living. Without death, life cannot be beautiful.
- High school relationships and how it feels to fall in love for the first time.
Which one should I start with? Thinking about high school relationships has been bringing me new life recently.
I don’t know if it’s because most of us are fully alive in high school, even if we’re hormonal and messy. I think the messiness is the sign that we’re alive.
Aside from just being moody teenagers who hate everything, most of us hadn’t gone too deep into drinking or drugs yet. Maybe that was just me and my friends.
I don’t know if it’s because of how naive and inexperienced high schoolers are. They haven’t experienced heartbreak yet in relationships, so they are more willing to open themselves up and risk rejection, even when it is scary.
I don’t know exactly what makes high school relationships different than those we have later in life, but I can tell you one thing. They are definitely different. We are definitely different when we are in them, too.
It’s weird having to tell teenagers and young adults that PDA is inappropriate. I don’t remember what it was like when I had to be told that, but I am sure it was embarrassing.
I do remember how it felt to fall in love in high school. I used to say I didn’t love my high school boyfriend, but I don’t think that’s accurate nor correct. I think I was protecting my fragile ego since he has had more success in marriage than I have. I did love him, even though I also wanted to pursue the unknown.
But everything good in the world has to die eventually. If it didn’t we would be overrun by creation itself. This is why we cut the grass, weed gardens, harvest fruits and vegetables, slaughter animals for their meat, throw away art after we’re done making it. If we didn’t, there would be no room for us. In our homes, our years, on our planet.
If humans didn’t die, there’d be no room for new humans to be born. None of us would be able to move. We’d just be packed on the Earth like sardines in a can and that would be insanity. Imagine if humans couldn’t die but we had to move into the ocean in order to have space just to breathe? This planet would be a disaster if people were immortal. Absolute madness. We would have used each other as a human ladder to climb out of the atmosphere before anyone ever invented space travel, just to get away from one another.
Death is a good thing. Death is what makes life and the world more beautiful, for a myriad of reasons. One is because death is how we let go of that which is ready to be gotten rid of in order to make way for that which is ready to be born.
If old relationships didn’t end, and we never learned to heal from them, then we’d never get to make way for new ones that didn’t fit into the old paradigm.
If old behaviors didn’t die, we’d never evolve into better human beings. Human beings who accept that people come from all different conditions.
Schools are a hard place to do anything, because people within them – especially the children – like to argue that there is only ONE RIGHT WAY.
There’s not. And something you need to consider is that the thing you’re berating somebody for not knowing how to do, or for doing it incorrectly, or not doing it all when they “should know better”…they could be experiencing the exact opposite guidance when they’re not in school.
This bothers me to no end. I can’t explain it, it’s just a pet peeve of mine. Do you have any idea how many households are run differently than the school system? How many kids are being taught one way at home, and then they go to school and the teachers are ripping their hair out trying to figure out why the kids act the way they do? How many students argue with one another and put each other down, assuming that their way is the right way just because most people agree on it?
That’s not reality. Reality is that everyone learns different things based on where they come from. Just because you go to the same school, ride the same bus, doesn’t mean you were raised in the same households. Even living on the same street doesn’t guarantee you come from the same worlds.
Teenagers might not realize that, but adults have to. Eventually you have to mature, let the childish way of thinking go, and make room for wisdom to emerge in your understanding that nothing is a given. In 2026, we’re all bringing our own experiences and vantage points to things as simple as a game where you think you know all the rules exactly as they are meant to be played.
If you are insulting a person for not being exactly who you think they should be, have you ever taken a moment to consider how they learned to be who they are?
Or do you still operate with the mentality of a teenager?
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