“Joy.”

H,

What else can we say about “our endless, numbered days”? The press is on or off, we are thriving or surviving, we are making progress, or all things are in retrograde. The great tide mimic; the idea that one day we are swimming and the next week we are sinking into a known despair and that fear in your heart, always present, that your worst mistakes will be your destiny or that your highest point will have no true meaning. The up, the down and the middle all create an impression that life is what you suck out of the very marrow of this bony experience that starts in light and ends in darkness.

Yet, between both and all experiences, there is joy. When we wake up in worry or triumph or the middling listlessness of finding nothing is there, we have this thing by the side of things, like a tale, and this story tells us always: open your eyes, you are missing something important. You are missing your own life. And this is not carpe diem, this is not a self-help tool, this is not guru talk. This is a call from the eternal viewpoint, telling us we are just remembering this thing and we are made of sterner stuff and forever has not yet been crossed.

Now, this is not a pill to solve everything. There is much suffering in the world. We know why communists and capitalists and liberals and libertarians go on about the material existence we have. There are valid points in all that muck. This is something else: a clarion call to stand up straight and look these things in the eye, to remember we have voices still and we must learn how and when to use them, that we believe life is made of eternal stuff and that weeping in the night of human death is just a prelude to joy in this eternal morning.

Like Hozier says: Amen.