H,
We always come around to this idea: time is absurd and small and running
out. What will we do with all our days? How will we be more than we present? Will we
ever reach the heights of the things we believe in? Perhaps not. The older me
is less inclined to believe that success is a place or a feeling or something
on a gravestone. It is not one grand event but in every move we make towards
the light. I want to keep walking.
The freedom of knowing it is not one thing or thirty three things is
priceless. We do not, as the rapper said, have “only once chance to blow”. That
is not the sort of thing that lasts or that heals or takes us home. Carved into
the metaphorical human chest is an insatiable hole. We market to it in
consumerism and try to pretend it doesn’t exist in whatever the counterpoint to
marketing life as desire is these days. We try to put it in the context of good
deeds, altruistic ideals, or religious belief in hopes of channeling this
absurd emptiness to some good purpose. Yet, it rises from all those ashes. None
of that will fill the human soul. People fall short because there is no joy in
it and then we blame them for failing in public the way we fail in private.
This is not to say that anarchism or nihilism are the truth. Things in
opposition to something else are never solid ways to build a life. We are here
to experience the Joy of living in the light. Even when it does not feel like
it. There is no general guidebook on what this life looks like in specific terms.
We know only this: this thing in us that knows when we are honest and when we
are not. Honesty always leads to truth. Salvation comes from an honest
admission that we are fatally flawed. Being open to the idea that there is a
plan for every human soul is the true start of any real pilgrimage.
And do not be deceived, we are all walking toward something and someone,
even if we do not admit it and cannot recognize it. I believe we will all bask
in the light. We will all get to be honest. If it doesn’t apply to everyone and
cannot save every soul from the call to destruction, then it is not God and it
is not Joy.
We wake up every day with the same aches and longing and flaws but there
is also something else, growing and pushing us upwards, towards everything we
know is missing. There are no small lives and no small people in any life. It is
all connected and nothing in this world can compare to the things to come in
the next. When we close our earthly lives, we are asleep and when we wake up,
it is, and finally, Joy.