Life & Mortality Quote by Natalie Goldberg

Order is the story we tell ourselves so we can get through the day without screaming. Natalie Goldberg punctures that story with a list that swerves from the catastrophic to the idiotically mundane: die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. The whiplash is the point. She refuses the hierarchy our brains crave, where tragedy is “real” and clumsiness is “nothing.” In lived time, both can rupture a moment, reorganize a mood, derail a plan. The line reads like a writing prompt disguised as philosophy, which tracks for Goldberg: she’s long argued that attention, not control, is what makes a life (and a sentence) feel true.

The intent isn’t nihilism; it’s a corrective to the productivity-era fantasy that with enough discipline, hacks, and color-coded calendars, existence becomes manageable. “No matter how we try” implicates the self-improvement impulse without mocking it outright. You can do everything right and still be surprised, still be broken open. Even “fall in love” sits beside injury and death because it’s also an event that interrupts your carefully curated self, rearranging priorities with the force of accident.

The applesauce closer is the masterstroke: a domestic, almost comic spill that makes the whole observation tactile. It brings mortality down to the kitchen floor, where grief and absurdity share the same broom. Goldberg’s subtext is permission: stop demanding a clean narrative arc. Write, live, and pay attention to the mess, because the mess is the real plot.