Thoughts 8.9.21
If I am being honest with myself, I am simply put, having difficulty with the agonizing pressure of a full existence.
How are we meant to do it? Is there a right way?
You can be sure I would follow to the t the directions. Instead, I’m stuck between the tension of being true to myself and an unfortunate tendency towards narcissism. I’m trapped in a place between caring for others and an insulating and selfish addiction to self care. I’m feeling squeezed to find a place to feel a sense of equilibrium of this life’s great pressures. This life’s hard questions. Is there purpose beyond survival? Is there more to striving and building a credit score and saving up for my children’s children’s college? If there is a right way, why hasn’t anyone yet written it down? It seems to me after billions of individual experiences someone should have figured it out by now. Yet, there are so many who proclaim to have done just that. They give the right answers that so quickly and absurdly contradict with one another. Why do so many people have such a strong opinion about why they are right, and the one who came before them or who are even standing next to them are wrong… misguided for sure, but still wrong. Why do we all seem to start at nothing, and over 75 some odd years do our best at putting the picture together - only to scramble to puzzle pieces and toss them back in the box for the next player to dump them out and make their own picture? There is a part of my mind where I like to put these deep whispers of the eternal. I like to shove them there and bury them under fun, plane tickets, filet mignon, motorcycles and sun tans. I like to keep them contained. Because in the spirit of my honesty, I don’t like the lack of control I experience when I open this box. Knowing that in my life, in yours, and for some God forsaken reason, in all of collective human existence, these deep grindings of our shared experience will never be answered. There are some things too deep for an answer that can be written down and posted onto an app paired with a pretty picture. But here I am. Posting the picture, writing the questions you are maybe hoping will lead to an answer. And maybe I could, and some days I do. But today doesn’t feel like a day for a platitude. Today feels like a day for a prayer.
“Lord… I’m small and weak and oh so lost a lot of the time. There are times where you ignite in me confidence and joy and grant me peace and love incarnate. But there are also days where you leave me in a cruel awareness of my black hole of a soul. The devastation of the light. My soul is the destroyer of worlds, the obliteration of goodness. Today I hold to the hope and the knowledge that you hold the cosmos in your hand. At the sound of your voice light is given life, and despite the desolation of unanswerable questions, you are the dawn of hope, peace and as you have said, the greatest of all - love. Maybe it is a platitude, but today I will anchor my wavering ship to the solid rock of who you have said to be. For in the storm of this life, I’m a sailor ready to grab hold of what I have seen to be a firm hold.