It's All Chicken Shit

It must have been almost twenty years ago when I heard a friend, a seasoned punk poet, say these wise and eternal words: "There's two rules in life.  1. Don't let the chicken shit get you down, and, 2. It's all chicken shit."  I love this quote, the words have lived and resonated in my soul and I have done my best in my own feeble, stumbling way to live by them.  Today I tried to find the source of this quote on the Internet, but without success, so I am going to attribute it to my punk poet friend whom I haven't seen in more years than I can imagine.
     Do I believe these words?  Well, yes, more or less.  There are some things that still pack enough gravitas so that they cannot be relegated as chicken shit, such as the death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, famine, a major killer earth quake, or a nuclear meltdown.  Almost everything else is negotiable and therefore belongs in the category of chicken shit. 
     We seem to never fail at making things more important than they really are and few of us ever stop to wonder if this will matter in one hundred years, ten years, next year, or tomorrow.  Usually we forget within minutes.  Your boyfriend just dumped you?  Aww, don't worry, it's chicken shit.  Your girlfriend has banished you to the couch?  Chicken shit.  You broke a nail?  Chicken shit. You were just gang raped by a gang of boy scouts?  Hey, wait a minute!
     Life is a complex dance with so many unscripted steps and moves that we often only wish we could sit it out by the punch bowl but that is never going to happen.  We can take things very seriously, or not at all, or we can mock everything, or we can blindly plunge into the dance in a whoop of joy and sing along with the music until we trip, fall or otherwise get hurt.  Then we get up, or someone helps us up and we limp back into the dance until the next fall.  I think there is a continuum of obstinate joy that we have to learn how to cultivate, without which we cannot cope with the unexpected.  There is another name for this obstinate joy.  I call it gratitude.