When I was a teenager I had a creepy boyfriend (okay, several, but one relevant to this post) who, among his other self-aggrandizing habits, used to insist that the apocalypse was coming, that he would go down fighting in a heroic last stand against The Encroaching Darkness. (We lived in the middle of nowhere, okay. It was grand fantasies or hanging out in the Taco Bell parking lot, as far as entertainment options went.) He had a date set and everything. The date was fourteen years ago today.
So it feels somehow appropriate that my feed reader handed me a great post this morning on the apocalypse NOT coming, and the things that underlie all the dire prophecies. I'm still not optimistic about the large-scale future, but these days I'm a lot more on board with a vision like Kelly Coyne's definition of the Crappening. It doesn't have the bombast and melodrama that appeal to you if you're a teenager or a Hollywood executive, but it does have a higher survivability rate (at least as long as we're using a shorter timeline than Tyler Durden's).
And Coyne's heavy-laden burro is a comforting image for me today, in the same way that the refrain titling this post is a comforting mantra. Peace is only for the dead and the dying. You're carrying something heavy; sometimes things are rough; sometimes you have a long hill to climb. But it's okay: that's life. There are hard bits. It's going to shake you up. But you can still keep going, because that's what you do. The point is not the end of the road. The point is that you're walking.
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