Initial Inclination

I made a joke about becoming a bitter 30-something to a friend the other day. It was in response to the complexity that so many people our age assign their lives, myself included. We cannot be content to sit in a converted garage writing without worrying that we'll become a recluse. We cannot gather with only the usual measure of people, work a regular job, or have normal lives. All our best intentions seem to be for naught.

The wounds of the world put into some strange context when I think about the duration of a lifetime and how truly short it is. That you could line the lifetimes of just 25 or so people together and lay down a duration that would put you somewhere in the time of Christ or the Roman Empire. The events that have shaped the world even two-thousand years ago are fresh on the world and the fullness of mankind's presence in the world is barely a breath in the full span of the earth. I love making myself feel small, my clothes fit better.

I got a fortune cookie once that said, 'keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows'. This is generally the attitude of most people wandering about the planet, endlessly optimistic, and blindly so. I envy them. In the wake of all that has been wrought in the world radiating out from my own circle of social influence to a worldwide scale all seems to be in great turmoil. I've had this very strong sense that this year will be different from any other I have lived, that the position of magnetic North in the landscape of my life and the world surrounding it will change somehow forever.

Every word I write taking me closer to my goal gives me a greater and greater sense of why people write. The presence of my own works acts like a small library of thoughts, quotes, stories, and ideas. The stuff of my mind slowly filling manilla file folders, moleskin notebooks, and hard drive space. Not a whole lot of it is even that good and will likely languish wherever it got filed, lost to the haze that is my arcane creative process... a pity and a present when I find the patience to go back through my own works. It is amazing how often I will have rewritten something a dozen or more times and in the aftermath... go with my initial inclination. Such is the way of things.

Both my journal and my blog entries have become a strange walk through the metaphysical and ethical murk of my everyday life creeping into my thoughts and therefore my writing. It isn't for my own well being that I have found myself contemplating the obscure notions of the human condition, the motives for our triumph and folly. I would like to think myself altruistic to seek out these things to aid others but the truth isn't that simple by a long shot. To merely know would be enough I think, but why settle for the minimum experience.

So...

Feelings are indefensible and vulnerable to the complexities of Belief. Belief can change and adapt but feelings are inviolable often setting up like so much emotional concrete, the walls that would prevent all compromise. Neither weathers the scrutiny of reason without relying heavily in the defense that can be granted by cold logic. There is no logic without either the abandonment of emotion or the constant questioning of all belief, or both. The byproduct of ignoring our given capacity to reason is often the pain of powerlessness. Yet this is preferable to so many because the process of setting our own emotions aside, questioning our own beliefs, and seeking a higher understanding of ourselves... is often just as painful.

It is a pain we relive and endure many times over as we shrug off complacency or seek to be burned by a keen understanding of our fragile condition.

I would have it no other way.