My friend from college Jack - who gave me tons of random pieces of advice that have proven to be incredibly wise - once told me that when you’re in a relationship, you find out exactly how awful of a person you can really be. It was something like that. Add it to the ever growing list of Jack Was Right.

All of a sudden I’m sensitive to seeing myself in a different light. It’s one thing for your friends to make judgments about you - I mean, you know all their crap, and you know it’s a mutual crapfest. But romance seems to work differently. Somehow the other person is angelic for a while, which makes all your faults stand out like they’re the only ones between the two of you. (Read: I’m insecure.)

Insecurity is unattractive. But there’s nothing worse than getting insecure about your own insecurity. So I thought I’d blog it instead of calling and rambling a bunch of random crap about it to a guy who I already say the dumbest things to on a pretty consistent basis.

The stark reality is that unless he’s some kind of robot, he’s still in the phase where he overlooks my insanity in favor of other, better qualities.  I’m the only one freaking out.  And yeah, I’m a little given to panic anyway. Even writing about it is blowing this feeling out of proportion.

But on the other hand, I didn’t realize what a human being he was, going in to this. I don’t mean imperfections. I mean, how it’s possible to hurt him with a joke. And how he thinks about me as an entire package, and not just some woman in a body. I have no idea if we’re in the angelic phase or if he is just an amazing person. How long, you think, before I can know?

I heard a friend of mine (James?) say the first 6 months don’t count. Seriously? You can go 6 months with a person and not have a clue who they really are?

I wonder if the beginning of a relationship is set up this way intentionally… like, once you get comfortable with each other, you can get your mulligans out of the way and learn how to treat one another. Then, by the time you really matter to each other, you have a better sense of what you ought to be doing and saying. Maybe the first 6 months don’t count because those are your mulligans.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never had a relationship. I’m saying too much, I’m not saying enough. Oh, how very R.E.M.

The constant critique of myself is juvenile. It is an attitude that refuses to face reality. You’re either comfortable with each other or you’re not. It works or it doesn’t. At this stage, when it’s still early on, the goal should be to learn to respect your Other while still being a genuine version of yourself. That should be kind of easy. But it looks like there are things I’m not admitting to myself about my own imperfection. There’s not a lot of acceptance all of a sudden. Imagine being someone like me, who cares what others think of them, and then getting into a situation where more and more of your decisions affect someone else in one way or another. It’s not just creating insecurity. It’s running rampant in my psyche - it’s systematically taking down the security I thought I had already built.

Which brings us to Allie’s advice. You can’t build security. She called me out on having too many walls. I liek to think my walls have done me a favor or two in the past… but of course, she’s right. I’ve been an island for so long I don’t know if I can acknowledge other people in the way I should.

If security is an illusion, is vulnerability the ultimate goal? If you can be vulnerable, and be good at it and really live that way - wouldn’t that be ideal?  So that’s my goal. And it means I have to be ridiculous in front of someone I like. I can’t hide behind any insincerity.

There is a graceful way to remove walls. It’s a process, and it shouldn’t be quick. It should be thorough. That’s a theory. I’ll let you know.

So… what if? What if I’m trusting someone I shouldn’t be trusting? What if I’m hurt? Any movie will tell you that investing yourself into relationships you believe in is usually worth the heartbreak. But what I can’t help thinking about is, what if I hurt someone? What if I can’t be trusted? That’s where my insecurity frightens me. I believe all kinds of good things about myself but now every time I behave selfishly, all of a sudden there’s someone else. Now I’m not just putting myself first, but putting myself ahead of someone else, which is a totally different act. And I’m starting to panic about it. Shouldn’t I be secure in my good qualities? Shouldn’t I know that I’m trustworthy and loving?

You can’t really know until someone else is involved. So Jack was right. And so was Cooley. Without other people, your picture of yourself is incomplete. Right now, I know I’m not a monster and I think I’m not hateful. But I’m starting to see that I’m unwise and I’m careless. In my opinion, that’s beyond being human - that’s a real character flaw. And as subjective as the whole question is, I’m not sure if it ruins me or not, and I feel like I wish I knew.

Obviously, my ability to cooperate with any rules is dependent upon my comprehension of them. Sometimes I talk myself out of questioning – I mean, it does make me pretty miserable a lot of the time, and it’s not something I consider a way of life. Nonetheless, we all question our religions to some extent (many of us to *the full extent*) and I’m no exception.

Certain practices just don’t make sense to me. But I don’t want to disrespect them, and I feel that they are valuable to other people.  It’s all coming back up now because I’ve figured out why I feel detached and unable to be a part of them, even after I find a way to understand or justify them.

You know I loves my metaphors/similes/allegories/pointless an inconsistent parables. So here we go.

I’m so ridiculous about movies. I get so attached to the characters that I feel like I need a week to mourn if someone dies. I was depressed for 2 weeks after I watched the Truman Show. I sobbed all the way through Prancer… even I can’t account for that.  A friend of mine once told me that she figured movies were my way to emotionally release, and that I wasn’t crying for the characters but for some aspect of myself I saw reflected. It made sense but it didn’t ring true. There have been rare times when I wasn’t so raw. Characters I didn’t feel for and sad movies that didn’t stay with me. But generally when I am able feel something inside, and see it represented on the outside, it’s too much for me to bear.

So here we are, back to religion, although I earnestly think this is not isolated to religion.

At some point in my life as a Christian I began to wonder what fasting was all about. I’d keep my eyes open for scriptures and practical applications about it. I can’t deny it’s part of our tradition, although I kind of want to. I can’t deny it’s supposed to be a significant act. It’s supposed to mean something. At the time, I was trying to start living more faithfully taking the 3 most obvious aspects of Christian living that before, had seemed to me …well… like good ideas that had no place being considered essentials. Fasting was one. Tithing was another. Purity was the last.

In Isaiah, there’s this big passage about God’s people who were fasting physically, but they weren’t doing good to the people who needed it. God is telling them, through Isaiah (right?), that He doesn’t want them to fast because He wants them not to eat – He wants them to fast and somehow in relation to that, give to the poor, and take care of their neighbors, and not ignore the poverty and suffering around them.

The time when I considered fasting an issue worth getting to the bottom of was the single worst time in my life. I was very aware of the suffering of others, and I was – really, out of love – contributing to it, often beyond my means, and with great empathy.  My affections for people in need have waned since then, and at these times I question myself, so fasting comes back to mind.

So, I did it. This was back in the day. I did it. And instead of spiritual satisfaction, I felt emptier and emptier. Does this mean that the fasting didn’t “work” and it’s all bunk? Does it mean that fasting is supposed to make you miserable because you are taking on more suffering for the greater good? How does it do anyone any good if I don’t eat? How does it help someone else if I don’t have the strength to give anything to them? Are we supposed to be worn out all the time for the sake of love? How does it increase my relationship with Jesus to be following a rule that doesn’t make sense to me? Is this a practice that involves blind trust that obedience done in faith will cause an increase of *something* holy, somewhere?

That was as satisfactory an answer as I could find. But after several months of fasting once a week (every other week if I was honest), I found myself unable to continue, having become discouraged and worried that I was being ridiculous. I thought my inability to follow through was from a lack of discipline.

Looking back, it seems like my beliefs themselves were hampering me more than anything, from moving forward with these practices. As strange as it is that I couldn’t grasp this before now, the principles that I was clinging to were metaphors themselves. That the hunger I felt when I fasted was painful because I already suffered such an agonizing hunger every day. The tithing hurt because my money is a secondary form of power, and I was already powerless. The purity seemed out of proportion to me as well – it wasn’t going to make me pure, it was an unnecessary fence. Weren’t we just supposed to be wise? Weren’t we in a faith with no rules? Couldn’t I give or abstain from anything at any time, depending on the meaning of the moment?

I’m not the first person to conclude that everything is a reflection and lesson for the inner man. But it’s become more apparent to me as I question again why those items nag at me now and then, here after so many (4) years. The confidence to turn the physical into the spiritual with any freedom has only come to me with my slow-developing maturity. I don’t think I would have been able to accept these explanations even a year ago.

I can’t give up whatever my faith is and instead take up hedonism, pursuing rest and food and money and whatever else appeals to me. I wouldn’t be able to embrace that life. And no matter how many times you show me how easy it is to pull someone off a chair, I’m not going to be worried that I’m at risk for that. (Deep down, I’m not secure in much. But I am fully, without question, secure in my attachment to my belief in Christ. Not because “I’m sure” like a new Christian is sure, or “I’m sure” like a pastor or an evangelist is sure, and not because I hope to convince someone else for some purpose. As far as I know, no one I know has faced the intensity or horror of the testing of my faith’s sincerity that I endured. There’s a reason I call it “the year I went crazy.”)

The reason it’s so hard to do a lot of “Christian” things is because they reveal the void within us, and expose it without healing it. That’s why I couldn’t participate in fasting, et al. I was/am starved, unsatisfied, powerless, and restless in spirit. The conclusion is that if you can define yourself with the invisible form of something, the visible form seems horrific. The inability to believe that the ends are justifying the means of your suffering inwardly, seems to exclude the possibility that *anything* could justify echoing it with its physical translation. At least, that’s what seems to keep me from behaving as I’m expected. But I’m not worried. I grew a bit this month and it seemed appropriate to talk about it for a long minute.

Is it true that the more selfish you are, the less you enjoy life? And does selfishness only breed selfishness, until people are essentially stuck to themselves?

As I reached toward my mid twenties, the world was expanding for me, and now that I’m coming back down from the middle the world seems to be closing in around me. I trim everything down until I feel I can handle it. Does this signify a need for control and therefore a flaw? Or is this what’s supposed to happen?

If human beings are made of energy, and we can’t die without our energy passing into another form, should we go ahead and spend whatever energy we have, knowing that we can’t use it up?

Why is it that when I feel like I’m helping people, I feel useless, and when I’m making money to support myself, I feel important?

How can I feel hatred toward someone simply because they aren’t doing what I think they should do? Am I insisting on moral absolutes, or am I somehow justifying my own approach to life by judging the rest?

There is a different frame of mind that I find myself in, whenever I think about historic times and cultures. When I put myself in their shoes,. I think of all the things I know that they probably didn’t. I wonder how they got by, and I get the distinct sense that everything that ever mattered to them has been forgotten. and buried underground. But when I think of myself of course I never feel the same pity. No doubt in 100 years some child will hear of the things I once believed and laugh, because I was so obviously wrong. And for some reason, one that I really can’t explain, I’ve begun to actually feel that my whole life, even the present moment, is history.  It seems so far gone - so outdated. It’s the same mindset…  as though I drive a buggy and meet my friends at the saloon for poker, when I’m driving to O’Henry’s for coffee. The only thing in my life that I can tell might be contributing to this is my ever-growing acceptance of all systems as corrupt.  I wish we would dialog less about the Bible being written by imperfect men, and more about the law of the land being written by him too, and upheld by his sons, and perpetuated by corrupted virtues. It’s very odd to feel like my life is expiring right before my eyes. Every day feels like a step toward history, rather than a new tomorrow. I feel like I’m walking backwards in time. What would cause me to feel dead while I’m alive? Some faulty belief system? Some missing hope? Some unseen emptiness around me?

Is it true that the battle of the sexes is the only one that will never end? Is it because everyone has a gender, and thus no one is deemed credible enough to call a truce?

Why can’t I let go of what others think of me? Ever?

Why do I look in the mirror to feel real, then when I look away, feel that my soul is screaming at me that it wants to get out of me?

I am starting to really believe that everything has stopped. Did I cause this? Am I a victim of my own perspective, or the only real friend it has?

Is it capitalism’s fault that I associate self worth with net worth? Or is it a natural inclination, the desire for independence and the need to think literally anything is possible if I work hard enough?

I have loved and lost, and I have been loved and been lost, and I still feel like I’ve never lived or loved. It would seem that love is an answer for many of my petty concerns and insecurities, but that’s impossible for me since I scrutinize flaws in loving just as harshly as I do every other behavior of mine. Can I possibly let go of selfishness and just love, if I’m consistently disappointed in my attempts at loving? Is there nothing I can do to ease this?

Is life just a string of events in which we become more and more shocked at the things we do and the areas where we’re not very strong? Is this the same question I’ve asked for the last 5 years? Am I seeking humility, but then rejecting it when I find it? And who’s going to help me, if I can’t follow all the rules to find someone?

Am I lazy?

You can’t make something ugly into something beautiful. That sounds like a statement that would offend me if someone else said it. When I step outside, I feel an intense nagging in my spirit - the human body in all its forms around me, is begging to be showcased. I can feel the faces of other people imploring the universe that someone would decorate them.

I keep thinking of makeover shows, which have always struck me as closed-minded trend pushers. I feel the same urge to decorate people, and I can’t seem to help it.

I’m not sure, though, that makeover shows approach people with the idea that they are already beautiful. They seem to assume that it is something inherently ugly that begs to be covered up with a couple clean lines and some rouge. In my mind, things work differently.

You can’t make something ugly into something beautiful - and in every single case I can think of, the human body is inherently beautiful, or is the potential energy of beauty. It does not “contain” something beautiful that waits to be revealed and highlighted. It IS beautiful, and I can prove it. Anyone who has ever felt someone else’s body was calling out to be told it was special can already concede the point. How about the fact that the visual body is the only part of you that truly experiences the outside world as well as the inside one. How about the longing to be with someone beautiful? Why do you match your socks?

What I mean is, when I see something ugly, from an artistic point of view, it because that thing gives a message of ugliness for its own specific purpose. Sure, you’ve met people you wouldn’t want to sleep with. But I myself have never met someone whose very visage conveyed something without a spot of beauty.

And that’s one of the best thing about beauty. One splash of it can change an entire scene.

Does your skin have to be perfect? And your makeup flawless, and your shoes and purse matching? There’s a reason that we avoid overkill of beauty. It’s not meant to fill a space, but to accentuate the entire picture. A picture of complete beauty doesn’t really ring true, does it? Flawlessness always seems like a lie - even near-flawlessness. And that’s because beauty js a magical, desirable spice and flavor. It is not a meal.

Yet here we are, in these bodies, splashing our beauty onto this bleak earth, in overwhelming numbers.

To change the pace a little… I myself see hypocrisy in the idea that ugly cannot be made beautiful. On the one hand, ugly is art. It’s all art. Ugly is truth. But just like complete beauty seems like a lie, complete ugliness is hard to find as well. The mistake we make is in believing that ugly is the more powerful factor in an image just because its representations are the most numerous.

Why wouldn’t we feel that way, anyway? The journey to adulthood is really, for many of us, just a slow and deadening process by which we lose our belief in beauty. It all its mystery and power, in all its everlasting victory, and we learn to pity those who hope for beauty and still profess to know it’s at the fingertips of every one of us.

As a feminist, I make the mistake too, of assuming that human nature is the only kind of nature. Forgetting that it is a very special display of a certain kind of love.

My own love affair is with color. When color comes into play, I can’t seem to focus on anything else. I get stuck on small tasks for hours, trying to create beautiful color combinations.

Does color reflect another kind of nature? Sure! It’s so free, yet so governed by immutable laws. And time, another kind of nature. And math, one of my favorite art forms. So limitless, yet so concrete. Therefore, feminist though I am, I love the idea of the human body as an incomparable thing of beauty that can somehow display other natural beauties - and instead of taking away from its own, it highlights it. I love the idea that a green pair of earrings gives my eyes a beauty they didn’t have before. I love that I can cover the pink in my skin with tan, and bring out the whites in my eyes. I love that I can smile, and show a brilliant flash of white that makes the black in my lashes irreplaceable instead of clunky and out of place.

So if I say you can’t make something ugly into something beautiful, it’s because beauty is like what a candle does to a fallen cake. It takes something that was mundane all alone, and turns it into a celebration! I genuinely don’t know if it’s just me that the body calls out to as a canvas does to an artist. It seems that many people have the inclination to highlight those few qualities that stand out, and make good use of the splashes of beauty already at their disposal.

And I really believe the body is the perfect canvas for some of life’s most beautiful qualities, be they points in time, balances of numbers, or color theory’s favorite formulas. Sure, the perspective I hold is little but an angle. Then, I seem to find that my angles work for me quite nicely.

It’s very sweet to think of the way beauty overtakes an entire image. Are we predisposed to look for it? Are we all poets in that way? If ugly were really trying to make a statemtn, don’t worry, it would make it in just a splash too. But in cases where the glass is half full or half empty, individual perspective comes into play. Again, the mistake we make is in believing that because someone took a sip from the glass, that it is only half filled. That’s what makes a a perfectly nice person into someone who only dates skinny girls, or only sleeps with blondes. They have failed to acknowledge the overwhelmingly positive amount of water left. And again, that is what leads to our belief that ugly is just as common as beautiful.

The truth is much more accessible than that.

Does it make anyone else melt a little, to think about Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett as a couple? Here’s a guy who seems pretty rough, and he’s didn’t ever seem to be beautiful - not without his inner man, anyway. Along comes Julia, with all her charisma and intelligence and in my imagination, she just exudes life. *WHAT IS IT* that makes them a couple!? You know? It blows my mind! Until I think about this… There’s no reason beauty and ugly would marry each other. Just like Night and Day never show up to the same party, some things in nature are true opposites. Then I realize that marriages are not made of night and day, but of yin and yang, each of which never really shows up to a party totally independent of the other - arrive in separate cars though they may.

Like I said, beauty is best in splashes. If the glass is half beautiful and half ugly, there’s little poetry - only a choice for the viewer to make - no real truth. Opposites do not balance each other toward peace. Their juxtaposition strikes a chord that one of them is a lie and that the viewer MUST choose.

So 100% of either quality is not appealing to the soul, and neither is an equitable division of the two. And although I don’t believe people are ugly but rather some are blank canvases awaiting a splash of beauty, the perception of others is what makes all the difference between pretty and ugly. Essentially - that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Can you imagine if Lyle and Julia walked into your dinner party together? This idea blows my mind more than the fact that they are together - they find each other appealing. This means that there is some quality in the honesty of Lyle’s imperfection that Julia relates to… she sees herself in there somewhere. And when Lyle sees Julia he feels some of her beauty… he recognizes an honesty of a quality in himself… in her, somewhere. They aren’t 50/50. They are , conservatively, 40/10/40/10, still acknowledging that we aren’t talking about beauty vs. ugly, but the question of how pronounced beauty becomes when paired with the rest of the image on the canvas. What you’ll see is that it doesn’t take much beauty to make the whole thing worthwhile.

That, people, is poetry at its finest. Because now, remember that we the viewers have our poetic eyes peeled, foremost, in search of beauty. The 40 of mundane in Lyle relieves Julia of the obligation to be perfect. It also relieves the viewer, gently, of having to believe that there is such thing as an untainted beauty in humanity. And the 40 of beautiful in Julia makes visible a quality in Lyle we really never would have seen without her: the beauty in him. I mean the physical, visual kind of beauty. To me, that’s some kind of miracle. That’s some kind of life lesson, that the splashes of vibrancy, the reds and oranges of life, are worth all the trouble.

Sadly, I’m a grown up, and the idea of love no longer makes me euphoric. The hope for something beautiful has faded. And when good things happen, I take them in my palm and set them aside as though they don’t really represent my experiences, because they are so small and so infrequent. I can’t cause them or predict them or really explain them. I feel ashamed when they make me happy. I can’t consider them life, can I? At some point between then and now, I’ve accepted the idea that life is a string of awful moments tied together by deserted sections of a canvas.

Maybe my life is Lyle Lovett. It stands alone, with all this potential for beauty, but no one to recognize it. Maybe my body is Lyle. And maybe Lyle will be alone forever.

But I like to think there’s someone to answer that call. If color and form call out to me to bring out just a few pieces of them, and if I’m so tempted to respond that I can practically fall in love, then maybe my life calls out to goodness and virtue, imploring it to decorate just one thing: don’t fill me up; just use my glass for the overflow. Don’t make me over; just bring out my eyes. Don’t give me a mansion and a Rolex; just pay my bills.

When I think of it in those terms, I have to be honest. Life has given me beauty, over and over and over again. More than I need. Yet I insist that I am deprived of it.

You don’t want *too much* - you want splashes. You are interested in a balance, where beauty outweighs everything else.  That is a healthy sense of what properly decorates a life. Beauty does not come in like a flood on top of everything awful. It’s an ant carrying ten times its weight in food. It’s a flashlight under the covers.

When you think of life as I do, it’s easy to see why beauty would be lost. Here you work day in and day out with a puddle of black ink. Come on… you’re going to add a drop or three of red and tell me that makes a difference? Or maybe it’s not accurate to think of it as paint, but as light. Paint is for hiding things. Paint is for unwanted. Oddly, people seem to use it to cover blank spaces a whole lot more than to hide real ugliness… this is what I mean when I say ugly is artful and communicative. Hiding it deprives us of that. What nature abhors, as you might recall, is not a mess, but a vacuum.

There’s no conclusion to this for me right now, except to say that I know beauty is only beautiful when it is held next to something which isn’t… and pure, unadulterated ugly seems pretty hard to find. That you can read a book by the light of a candle, and that somehow that makes even the darkness essential, and the night worth enduring even though you get no rest.

Sorry that’s not a very eloquent ending. I’m just having a thaw of the hope for beauty; it’s kind of like when Belle is in the scary mansion and all of a sudden the footstool is drooling and the teapot is singing. Part of me is going, remember reality, but my mind just keeps saying to it, what if THIS is reality? So… you know, sorry for being confusing again. Goodnight,

A couple immedaite problems with the last post. 1. I compare myself to and put myself on equal footing with God. I didn’t mean to do that, but I can’t think of any religion where that’s considered respectful… and it sat funny with me.

2. I may have incorrectly assessed the relationship of God to people as a marriage. I mean, the hymn says - God our father, Christ our brother. Other theologies may call God an energy or a Mother. The only time Christian texts call God a husband, I think, is as an example when speaking directly to husbands. Euuughhh… I don’t like to talk Bible, let’s move on.

How is the parental relationship different than the spousal one?

To summarize the most obvious difference, the parental relationship is more permanent because of blood ties, but somehow less emotionally intimate. There’s also a subtle implication that the parent will always be the more loving of the two. If a spouse dies, you can bond yourself just as strongly to another one. If Dad dies… your mom might find a person to fill that role. But you probably can’t do that.

I guess it would break down into two schools of thought. And despite myself, I find the parental view more soothing. Whether it’s true or not I couldn’t tell you.

God as a parent feels like a provider, someone who’s got your back even when you’re disrespectful, someone who takes care of your needs when you can’t, who shows off all the macaroni art you made and bursts into tears when you show good character, someone who would have given their life for you the minute they found out you existed, someone who hurts when they have to correct you, someone who’s been through what you’ve been through and sympathizes, and if you disappeared they’d never really move on… I really find comfort in that. That’s probably the school of thought I find most relevant.

God as a spouse, well, that works a little differently and maybe the downsides aren’t any worse, just more obvious. If God were a husband, there isn’t that sense of authority, instead we have a sense of equity. Like I said in the last post, he is just as able as you are to leave the relationship. His decisions would look for mutually beneficial outcomes. You get to help decide what role he plays in the home, and you get to base it upon the role you yourself feel most suited to perform. He trusts you with intimate information, and he needs your encouragement.

If there’s anything interesting about this whole train of thought I’m taking, it is probably the different kinds of jealousy and protectiveness in those relationships.

Every time I walk out the front door, my parents give me warnings. They overestimate the danger of my living without their presence. They’re overprotective, and the exaggeration of that protectiveness comes straight from the huge love they have for me. They never wonder - would she just stop calling us if she found a better family? They only think of outside influences that might steal me from them.

I imagine if I were married, there would be less fear of me dying. I read somewhere that one of the major factors in a good marraige is whether partners view each other as competent individuals. Assuming my husband thinks I’m competent, he isn’t so afraid for me when I take my daily walk to the mailbox. His worry is - will she leave me if she finds someone better? Would I leave her? The marriage relationship has an inherent weakness in it because it has to be built from scratch, by 2 people who have had the most important relationships in their lives simply handed to them at birth. The panic comes in if my husband thinks I’m talking to another man. (My parents wouldn’t feel threatened if I talked to someone else’s parents.) My husband would likely track the guy down and scare the hell out of him. It’s an overreaction, and in an ideal scenario, it comes from love. (It’s worth thinking about that love might really motivate this behavior, whether it reflects other personal flaws - machismo, pride, jealousy - or not.)

I’m getting a little smile out of the fact that you could call the first school of thought a “predestination/sovereign God” approach, and the second one looks more like a “free will” philosophy. Both are loving relationships, they just have different risks and different means. Is it possible that God relates to us in both ways? Or maybe that all kinds of relationships reflect a different perspective of a singular love??

Thinking about jealous reactions, I wonder about the people we know as religious alarmists. (Oh yes, yes I just did, you can’t stop me now!) Maybe it’s not that they want to judge people or pick a fight. Maybe they just feel like someone is disrespecting their parent or their spouse, and it angers them not out of a sense of national moral decay, but a sense of family. Maybe they’re warning you to repent because the end is near, because they have a fierce and crazy love toward mankind. I mean, it kinda makes the whole thing sweet, in a weird way. Sure, it doesn’t feel like the kindness of love, not to us… but kindness is easy when a good relationship is at peace. When it’s threatened, I dare you to see anyone behaving reationally. 

You know, though, what’s funny is that if someone said something unkind about me, or if someone was hitting on me and I didn’t realize it… ideally I’d want the person who loved me to trust me. That means, communicate the situation, and put it back in my hands. If I’m trustworthy, I can seek peace and understanding before I call for reinforcement. I can try to quell extreme emotions on both sides. Does that sound silly? Again, I’m not trying to say - this is what I’d do, so it must be what God would do. I just feel like understanding a little human psychology might clarify the weird shape of the box God seems to be stuck in.

But the least I could do, if that’s what I really feel, is practice what I preach, and let God speak for itself, instead of feeling like I ought to be explainer of all these random thoughts. Luckily, I’m not sure about this stuff, so I’m probably going to keep writing.

Let’s suspend a few ideas. I don’t really ever address the question of evil, so we’re suspending it. And in this, we’re also suspending all the omni’s of the Christian God, and reducing he/she/it to a loving, emotional being that might very well be all the good things we say it is. In the very least, the kind you’d want as a pal.

Oh, also, we’re going to say you’re married to God.

Let’s pretend, in a much more horrifying scenario for you, you’re married to me. When am I happiest? When do I feel I’m getting what I intended out of this marriage?

Is it when you’re worshipping me? I have to say, I hope not. Are you worshipping me because you feel like you have to? Is it because, hey, could be worse. That seems like the kind of respect I’d want - I may not be the best but you could have done worse, so you’re still glad about the whole thing.

OK use your own brain to see where a God might find worship neat, but not the chief aim of being with you.

Back to me. Am I happiest and most satisfied with my marriage when you are doing right by me, and most unhappy when you are doing wrong by me?

Again, I really hope not. It would be pretty obvious I didn’t love you, wouldn’t it. I just love myself, since I’ve made my own power and happiness the central goal of an entire marriage. When you don’t do right by me, I don’t like it. When you do right by me, I do. But that’s a detail. That can’t be a goal.

Go ahead, do the God part now. I’ll wait.

I married you because I want to experience you, and I want to be experienced. I’m under no delusions that you’re somehow trapped in our relationship.

I don’t feel like writing too much tonight. I just want to rule out several popular thoughts about the purpose of God and his love for people. It’s not for his enjoyment alone - because that doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t work with love.

Marriage is supposed to be a give and take, and it’s supposed to be a lot of ups and downs. It’s easy to blame the other person’s imperfections for all of your misery - even if the other person is perfect. Conversely, it’s my style to take more blame than I ought to, forgetting that other people are competent to interpret my actions without demonizing me. Anyway.

I’ve been perusing my previous writing, and I have come to the conclusion that I am, in no uncertain terms, a juvenile self-important asshat.

Luckily, that doesn’t stop me from getting out of bed at some point after sunrise and possibly lunchtime.

First, what kind of asshat doesn’t edit their writing before they post it? And then, what kind of juvenile person says the same things people have been saying for years, like it’s big news? Not to mention most of these things have already been expounded upon ad nauseum by people far more important than I. Sooooo….

What was the point? Ohhh yes, I’m here to say, I acknolwedge my asshatness but on priciple alone I make little or not apology for it, because I cannot think of anyone I have ever met who was not, in some bold way, a similar type of hat.

Now on to the things that are on my mind. I’m taking a different approach this time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about innocent people. I mean, statistics make it obvious that a ton of innocent people go to jail. That, for some reason, terrifies me more than anything I can think of, including public speaking and bees or even combining those and speaking at a bee convention which would just be awful.

I’ve been doing WAAAY TOO MUCH thinking about the experience of these people, and I’ve ended up in their shoes emotionally, which has given me a fricken miserable week-ish. First, I think about how much like murder it is. But like, a conspiracy to murder, involving the original criminal, previous lawmakers, the family of the victim, everyone on both sides of the lawyers tables, the judge, the jury, and the public at large.

That’s where it gets emotional. Which means I could have had something rather well thought out except that I panic right here. All of a sudden I envision my family (who, in my vision, is basically Rudy Huxtable and some neighbors) hugging it out that I’m going to prison, and wanting to really experience the loss, but knowing that there’s this seed of doubt in their minds - what if she did it? So then they feel unable to call their friends and talk about it because if I’m in jail for something, then people are going to be sure I did something wrong.

Then I picture me. I’m sitting in a cell, right, and no one in prison believes I’m innocent either, because I’m so adamant about it. Which may be too much to assume but fear is making me imagine worst case scenarios.

Now I’ve got all my acquaintances talking smack about me and my family. THEN I’ve got to cope, right? Whatever it is, it’s going to be something I could never imagine having done, so now I’ve got an identity crisis because what my life looks like outside is not what it looks like inside.

I mean I could go on, but can you imagine all the people I’d have to forgive. How helpless I’d feel, and how without hope. Then to think that I can’t get anyone to look for whoever the criminal actually is? And even if they can show I’m innocent, do you know how hard it is to get someone out of jail? And even if I got out, there would always be this label following me, creating suspicion.

So.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my greatest fear in the world is not being trusted.

What if no one trusted me?

I’d be isolated in my entire reality, that’s what.

I know my last few posts have made me look a little (a lot) paranoid schizo looneytown.

But if I don’t think about this stuff, who will? I mean isn’t this kind of an unreachable group of people?

This whole thought process has taken me out of the sense of safety that I had - that if I don’t do anything wrong, I don’t get in trouble. You can’t trust that, man.

Now I have a sense that I am always exposed. That at any time, any nutjob or faulty law could impose itself onto my life. If innocent people are punished, stigmatized, and marginalized then nobody is safe.

And the point is (I always like to say the point because I know I write total nonsense and like the butt that I am, I am again not going to edit before I publish, I’m drunk with power I tell you) that I have become incredibly unsettled over something that does not affect me at all, exists only in potential, and undermines my sense of all that is moral and good.

I could talk about it forever and I’m sure that one day I’ll be able to more poetically and less frantically address this grim issue, but for now my steps are panic, ramble, publish. Yeah it’s embarassing. Publish!

It’s not really writer’s block, it’s more like the sense of fear you have when your mom asks you a question you were hoping you wouldn’t have to answer. I need to explore a couple things, but I’m not sure I want to be there when I do it. Here we go anyway. Hell, I’m giving myself bravery points for starting typing.

Let’s get the easy stuff first. I’ve been thinking lately about focus. About how we’re born into these tiny rooms of life and we think that the goal is to expand beyond the walls… assuming that familiarity and knowledge of what’s in the room is good enough for it. And I guess people who say “Bloom where you’re planted” have found a ceramics-suitable way of saying what I mean here.

When my father asks me if I’m learning web design, and if I’m learning to do more, I want to explain it like that room. Yeah, I know how to make four walls and furniture, and I could use that kind of knowledge to build a whole house. But when I’m learning, it’s an odd trend to see that things don’t grow outward, they grow inward. I can tell I’m getting better when the size of the room doesn’t change, it just becomes more and more finely detailed; that adds value.

I’m saying that I’ve been thinking about building the value of my life, by creating focus - by making things smaller and more centralized. Instead of useing your knowledge of the basics, to expand the scale of your life indefinitely… maybe use all that skill to make smaller things better… which is also a path that stretches to an indefinite point.

And that warrants a hitting of the publish button.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened to a friend of mine. She was 15, there were 10 witnesses, and I believe her.

But if I told you it was a robbery, how would you feel about her?

Why? Because you hear about robberies every day? Maybe because she would have no motive to make it up? Because 10 people don’t lie? Because she’s still sticking to her story?

What if I said, she was kidnapped by Bigfoot. Then how would you feel?

Skeptical? Ready to latch on to a detail that helps you rationalize it into the known world?  Tired of crazy people and their theories? Maybe you’d want to know what medications she was on.

And what of me, if I trust her? What if I can’t verify that a robbery ever took place. What if I can’t ever prove that Bigfoot was real, and for that matter, that he was malicious.

And what of you, that you can find a thousand sources of related information but none credible?

What if I said, she saw God.

Now, she’s a religious fanatic? Because of something that was beyond her control, that entered her life - the same as a robbery might - and altered her forever? She’s delusional and stubborn? Because where you perceive walls, she insists that there are none? She’s lying? Because your religion is science, which insists that all experiences be reproduced in order for them to be true?

What’s amazing is that so many people refuse to use all of their eyes. You cannot ignore what you physically see, but you cannot always trust it to be real. Likewise, no one can deny having inner eyes and having witnessed on at least one occasion that which cannot be seen or even measured.

Let me ask you.

Where did you hear that unicorns weren’t real? How do you know that source was trustworthy? How did they know? All opinions of this sort can be traced to science or faith. Either someone has observed that unicorns do not exist in the wild, nor are they practically accounted for throughout recorded history - or someone has met a man he trusts who says they aren’t real. And that’s why we must question both.

Well, that’s why, in a way. But what problem needs to be solved? What end ought to be reached? I say: love.

Rather than talk about myself in this case, I’m going to address mankind, and assume he is a similar animal to me.

It’s impossible not to feel sometimes as though we’re in the dark.

There’s this sense that someone with more knowledge is lording it over us, withholding it for some sinister purpose. Interrupting the process of a no-holds-barred pursuit of what is real, and right, and absolute, and instead using the limits of mankind against him. But it gets worse from there. He then issues propaganda that creates a new, imaginary explanation of things, so that we are sated.

God, when I describe it that way, don’t you just want to fight! Don’t you think you’d take back your life, you’d save us all - with courageous force! And yet.

You are sated.

Why are you sated? You couldn’t possibly know. No one could. Your inner eyes have been blindfolded, and you can feel it, but you have no recourse. You’re a victim. You’re a pawn, and you’re without a hero. You have no eyes left but the physical, which offer you profane amounts of information, but never approach the limit of what can be known.

We’ve been subjected. To what, is irrelevant, isn’t it.

It’s strange that any of us would perceive this glass ceiling along the climb to enlightenment. I’d say it depends on two things. 1, which set of eyes you are predisposed to trust - science, or faith - and 2, how deeply the two are able to intermingle in your life.

If you are able to look up the ladder, and see straight through the glass, you would tell me that the glass isn’t there. That you can continue climbing until you reach nirvana. That science proves to you that since you were able to walk up the last 10 rungs, you consider your odds at 100% for walking successfully up the next 10. You may even become convinced that this formula is infinitely reliable, and assume you had acquired enough information to sustain you from now on.

That is a lie.

You didn’t create the lie. But you’re going to live it.

If you used faith as your sole compass, you wouldn’t be able to count the rungs you’d climbed. You’d know the feeling of the thumping, though, pretty intimately. You wouldn’t know where the ladder ended… so at each new rung, you’d grope into the air, and whatever you felt would dictate your response. If you were able to reach up right over your head, and feel that in 10 more rungs, there was a ceiling - you’d tell me that after that, you couldn’t go anymore. You might also assume you were close to the top, and therefore had sufficient expertise to handle it from here.

That is also a lie.

You didn’t create it. But you’d live it.

Let’s talk about intermingling the two.

Say you were the faith climber. Your outer eyes are blindfolded.

And let’s say you got to the place where you were bumping your hand at the top of your knowledge ladder. But when you felt of the ceiling, your hand detected raised lettering, that, when you traced it, revealed that there was more ladder beyond that point. And that is all it revealed.

The man with the outer eyes would come in handy about now, wouldn’t he. And he’d gladly discuss it all with you, because right about now he can’t figure out why he can see his reflection overhead.

Sadly, the moral of that illustration is not that by working together you can achieve progress. Fact is - you’re stuck. And you can’t convince your friends of what’s happening. You start to wonder if you’re crazy. Poor Inner Eyes, his friends say, a bump is a bump - not knowing that a message had come to him, that usually only appears to men of Outer Eyes.

And Outer Eyes is screaming like a crazy man, having seen something that has thus far been a legend perpitrated by men of Inner Eyes with too much time on their hands. Fate intermingled the two on his behalf.

I say, “on the behalf of each man,” because they not only discovered limits - but they discovered them in freak accidents that do not occur for all people. The man who is predisposed to trust science has been blessed in that faith has inserted itself - very unnaturally - into his field of vision. And his friend, who knows only faith, has been blessed that science has given him something he can perceive as well.

Who only uses science or faith? Who does not intermingle the two? I say: some people. It’s not fair to polarize groups of people  or arguments - however, because of how narrow our ‘vision’ becomes when we ‘look’ toward the end of the ladder, we have essentially polarized ourselves in this respect.

I’m putting you in this next one.

If I told you I saw God, and you believed me, because that made sense to you - we’d be friends. We’d understand something about one another. There would be a spark of kindred feelings… which I consider love.

What if it didn’t make sense to you? Do you think you could love me anyway?

Probably not - not concerning my vision of God, not in that special way. You have been unable to break through the nagging feeling that you are being decieved, so you can only trust what you see, and you are predisposed to trust the eyes of science.

Keep going, you’re in the next one as well.

Let’s say I should you proof that I’ve found and documented a 24th chromosome. The eyes of science compel you to believe me. Now we share something - we earn respect for one another.

But if you have the eyes of faith, there’s little I can do to prove my work. I can’t find any verses in any religious works that say there’s any such thing as chromosomes. I can’t help you experience them. I have to move on.

I know. It’s obvious we need to understand each other - again, that’s not the point.

This is the point.

You cannot convince someone else of their limits. If I tell you that you have limits that you don’t know about… that’s a red flag for you to trust me less, not more.

Mankind must perceive his own limits. Even the ones that he cannot breach. And for that to happen, his limits must speak his language.

All of the facts - all of them - that are widely agreed upon among mankind, started out as wingnut theories and unbelievable proposals. It was only when our language was integrated with the language of the facts. And so you see the climbers’ obstacles as blessings, because that is precisely the experience they were able to pioneer, wasn’t it? They witnessed the work of a catalyst as it was dissolving into a crossover - a meeting of the languages of the known and the unknown. And what’s better, it would have made them closer friends.

These perceptions in us, they layer themselves, very much like an onion - to enforce the sense that there is a container for truth, and that it is bound by the peel, or the bag, or the holder. One of the innermost layers says seeing is believing. The one outside that says believing is creating. The next one further out, tells us that creating is knowing. And the thinnest layer just under the peel has the most of us convinced that knowing, is being.

That, too, is a lie. Even a therapist could tell you that knowing is no relation to being. And you can dwell on any layer you like, but you can’t get rid of the disappointing flavor of truth as a whole. Or truth, as it’s been handed to you, in onion form.

I know I’ve gotten long-winded, and maybe I’m giving up too early on what this essay was intended to give. I just want you to know… and I can’t make you know, can I? That in the whole of humanity, there things that faith and science and knowledge and creation and sensation cannot replicate nor distribute. That not everything beyond the glass ceiling is attainable by all, but that when you hear of a mystery that purports to reach beyond what a reasonable man would attest to, don’t first begin to doubt the man. Doubt the onion! Think outside the peel! And then the bag, and the holder and so on until you confess that you are a stranger to life just as fully as the one for whom fate intervened and began to translate the unknown - no, the unknowable - right before her eyes.

So. I’m thinking of my friend. Just like most of mankind has been subjected to a limited perceived reality, she has no choice but to perceive a vast one… one that exceeds the furthest star in the universe, as far as most are concerned. Can you image how terrified she is? The truth that she witnessed, she cannot impart - she can only paint it with words. And inside the onion, it looks an awful lot like things that others have created and recreated with great consistency, using just a chemical. We hand her that explanation and sincerely expect her to ignore the taste of it, and agree that we’re right. That’s the way we love, isn’t it. We’re going to make her choose between denial, and fear?

What do you think she chose? Well… what’s the added consequence of fear? Loneliness. If she chooses fear, we don’t know how to love her. So we don’t. But what’s the added consequence of denial? The answer is - it doesn’t matter, it’s not going to stop the fear anyway. So the easiest option is to resist admitting the truth.

Just… consider the thought, that wherever there’s a perceived wall, you’re right to suspect it’s made of a lie, and a consider that there is a truth on the other side that you maybe will never reach, and that if you’re lucky, reaches you instead.

Maybe in the course of life, there are only 3 interdependent pieces.

1. What Is

2. Interpretation of What Is

3. What’s Done

It’s been said that you can’t change other people, and you can’t change your circumstances - all you can change is your reaction. If you apply that rule here, it dictates that the meaning of life doesn’t actually change, but that interpretation does.

What Is - meaning the truth, whether visible or unknown - is the most powerful influence on What’s Done. Despite the appearance of a strictly linear relationship, the truth is that all 3 of these elements are made up of the same stuff. They rely on one another through their differences.

The necessity of Interpretation of What Is coexisting with those two, is the very definition of humanity. We need to make sense of our world. The mind is said to create structure, even where there is none available. It builds relationships among our experiences.

And why not? Even if Interpretation of What Is leads us down arbitrary paths, to arbitrary conclusions, we can still see that it answers a need. And every time an Interpretation of What Is happens, it’s recorded in the universe, and therefore alters a little bit of What Is.

What’s Done seems fairly independent. It doesn’t seem invisible enough to be recorded in What Is. After all, What’s Done is perhaps a direct creation of What Is. And I can’t find much to convince me that Interpretation of What Is has a major influence over What’s Done. The most animalistic and inevitable of the three, What’s Done is often attributed to an Interpretation of What Is. All I seem to be able to do is strongly suspect that 100% of What’s Done can be attributed to What Is. I can’t make much argument for it. It’s a gut feeling, and it’s a big one.

Despite the fact that there have been as many Interpretations of What Is as there have been humans in the entire history of the planet, we each start from scratch. And I myself have built my own Interpretations of What Is. In my quest, I have integrated the templates of others and found that they suit some (but not all) of my needs.

Try as I may, I cannot find What Is. I cannot put my finger on it. All I can find are its Interpretations.

And this is where it gets strange. I believe that my best course of action is to focus my eye on What’s Done. I believe that Step 2 can be considered a table leaf; Steps 1 and 3 are fully functional, with or without it. What’s Done, however, appears to me a cornerstone - unchanging and mostly unchangeable. Since Step 1 eludes me, I draw my horizon by the one element that makes itself available to me.

Why has it been so easy before to rationalize that if I can find the most accurate or actionable Interpretation of What Is, then I will have the key to unlocking What’s Done? Possibly because that’s been a popular Interpretation of What Is. And accuracy and actionability aside, Interpretation of What Is should not be discounted.  After all, my family can eat at any size table, but I can’t invite my friends to eat unless the leaf is in. It is the only element of my table that I can implement at will.

Here’s another way of looking at it. If What Is can be represented by Absolute Truth, then What’s Done can be represented as Evidence of Absolute Truth, and Interpretation of What Is then takes the form, Response to the Evidence of Absolute Truth.

Absolute Truth contains and authors the history of mankind. Response to the Evidence of Absolute Truth rewrites the section of our history entitled “Mankind’s Response to Absolute Truth.” These responses vary widely, and implement themselves very powerfully into the history of life.

Now, imagine instead that What’s Done is characterized by a block of ice. It is the solidification of all the H2O molecules available to it. It makes the strongest argument for the existence of H2O because it has the most pronounced characteristics of any H2O embodiment. And if What’s Done indeed comes from What Is, then What Is can best be compared to water. It is the richest and most essential embodiment of H2O.

When water develops pockets of activity, it can create enough energy to form a third embodiment. Steam, which is eerily similar to Interpretation of What Is, is the direct product of an H2O group which has become so dynamic that it was unable to restrain itself as water. When you want to make steam from ice, you won’t be able to do it without the steam passing through a momentary water phase. Similarly, Interpretation of What Is encompasses all the major elements of life when it is drawn from What’s Done, because What’s Done is a direct product of What Is.

Embracing the Interpretation of What Is - putting the leaf in the center - is really an invaluable pursuit. It will create a distance between What Is and What’s Done, and simultaneously fill it. Instead of interrupting their reliance on one another, you effectively use them to create potential.

It’s not hard to find natural indications of the supernatural. These metaphors have illustrated 3 different items each composed of the same organic makeup. Identical H2O molecules, a single plank of wood, the consistency that defines absolute truth - each one like its own compact holy trinity. 

Birth, Life, and Death, in that order. Birth causes Death, and so Death is the most reliable evidence of Birth. Life does not create Birth. Life is evidence of the meaning of Birth and of Death, between whom it simultaneously creates a gap, and fills it.

Let’s assume we all choose our religion.

I know that social pressures often dictate our religious “home base” - and even if we could choose objectively, we’d use our first experience with religion as a personal system of weight and measure. We’d consider it our constant; the test we did where things went wrong, and we’d sample other religions and study their flaws.

But in a convenient twist for me, we implicity choose our religion by virtue of the fact that with every passing second, it remains in our hearts.

If we are choosing a religious set of values - one that seems to advocate morally consistent behaviors, philosophical meaning, a set of freedoms or a set of goals - we have signed up to value the unseen.

The truth is that everyone values the unseen. But maybe it’s not a very natural thing to do, to check in with it, to use it as a home base, to continually weigh the tangible parts of life against it.

Religion then allows people to choose a governing system of morality to which they hold themselves accountable. 

It’s intuitive to look at religion as a force all its own. We know that it influenced us as children, before we could make real, rational decisions. “Organized religion” may as well be a curse word, and when we look at religion, we are tempted to see only the whole, and none of the parts.

But entering it from the perspective of one who treasures the moral and ethical approach to living, religion really seems like a friend.

And in that sense, religion cannot be a whole. It can only be its parts. No one wants a large organization to dictate their beliefs. We want a humble partner, who recognizes what it is that we already think we ought to value, and encourages us. There is no religion; there is only faith.

The work of religion is then only the work of the people who create its amalgamated values. This is said with no disrespect toward those who believe God has created faith, God has created religion, and at the end of the day, God runs the whole show. I’d be inclined to agree with them. But I doubt we’d come to an agreement on the specifics.

Again - religion is nonexistent; faith is all there is. Faith creates. Faith mobilizes. Faith initiates choice.

Faith does not create a belief system. And that is where the flower begins to rise from the dirt. It is faith that causes a man to see himself in a supernatural light. It is an external belief system that tells him he can be beautiful, and begins to draw him away from his roots. The Christian interpretation of the believer as a flower involves the systematic process of growth. My own perspective would focus on the fact that the seed never leaves the dirt.

The point is that religion is not an entity at all; it is a term to describe the way that people externalize faith. And that should not frighten us. That should encourage us.

It’s not appealing that I start this blog entry with a John Mayer mention. But I’ve enjoyed the line “Gravity, stay the hell away from me.” And today it prompted a question or two.

The man makes a good point - if indeed he actually makes it, and I haven’t projected as I am wont to do. Wont wont wont wont. OK it’s out of my system.

What is that point? Oh, you’ve forgotten I was talking about a point? It is that life is gravity, and at all times it is working to pull you downward. My thoughts seems to wander towards the ground and rarely (if memory serves, never) do they make their way back up again without some conscious intervention.

There are times in which we can trust nature. If your stomach tells you it’s full, you can trust it! Stop eating! But if you fall in the water and nature tells you to flail about and splash, you must make the decision to fight nature. You’re fighting for your life, and when you are opposing nature you’ll have to force every single move.

Philosophers, religious figures, children, laborers, parents…. We’re all asking when to obey nature. And the whole thing baffles me too. There’s no hard and fast rule to answer this; I really believe that.

Doesn’t it seem wise to fight nature 99% of the time? Don’t we constantly talk ourselves out of obeying our bodies and emotions and physical impulses? And don’t we hear from our parents, preachers, and close friends that we ought to reconsider our every natural inclination? Isn’t it our natural inclinations that led us to seek their leadership to begin with? Is it perhaps then part of our nature to be self-muting… self-censoring? Does this mean that we can relax - our natures are complex creations and perhaps they take good and balanced care of our lives.

I wouldn’t begin to categorize entire individuals within this topic. But moving from situation to situation, different viewpoints are apparent. I believe we all use all of the processes, beliefs, and mechanisms I’m going to list, and that we find ourselves most comfortable - most natural - in our specific combinations of believing and then coping. The mere balance of these very understandings and processes of action ought to relax anyone who can see that there is real diversity in our reactions to nature itself.

Initially, wwo camps arise. They each define “nature.” One calls it impulse. The moment you feel an impulse, this is your nature, and action or inaction ought to follow based on the one instance. Who is feeling these impulses? Why? When? Toward what end? Those are the questions for Camp A. Camp B, in my opinion, waits patiently until nature explains itself through impulses, Camp B is building a larger picture of those impulses and its questions include How Long, Toward what end, How consistent is this impulse, and What does it ask of you or me?

Beyond that is chaos, as I am refraining from assigning any further specifics; nature has been defined for you, I hope you see your camp up there somewhere.

Now there are 4 major approaches.

Some believe in winning the fight against our natures. These people often place high importance on self-discipline, self-reliance, and moral behavior.

Others believe that the fight is all there is, but that they must continue to engage themselves in a war against their desires. The people I see who feel this conviction are often depressed but the endless nature of their situation and exhausted by the weight of their past endeavors toward - turns out - no victory at all. They either jump into the above camp, grasping tighter to their hope in victory (which I applaud for them because people who love coping, love to see people coping.) These people often try different lief-systems in general, perhaps calculating that nature’s effects may be worth the trip. They may sign on for the ole, live it and love it ticket. I myself may really be in this camp somewhere with a little loyalty even. My impulse after all these years is to fight my impulses silently. I usually win these battles, and I don’t have to think about them. But listen close, as I tend to feel that life itself is comprised of only two processes: growing up, and coping. Those who will fight until they die ought to be well-acquainted with the latter process. Growing up, for me, was learning to fight my nature and or impulses and or consistent impulses. Coping ought to involve, right off the bat, learning to destroy SOME of those convictions in favor of another (usually less severe) conviction and in doing so the “new man” I’ve been promised (through my faith I am being promised a new nature that takes over the old nature bit by bit) ought to make good use of himself. I can already see him doing his thing - helping me make decisions about what to do with my nature, in the unimaginable list of possible scenarios and their solutions.

Moving even further forward, many believe that nature is the same as impulse.  The question that arises for them looks something like - How long before we can satisfy this impulse? How much is it going to cost us? How long can we tolerate its constant nag until we are able to at least provide some answer to its question, or would it be right to just stomp it out before it gets too loud? I’d like to note that this approach, although simplistic, is efficient and I think it could be a pretty effective reaction.

An even more respected approach suggests to us that nature is really simply the impulse you can’t keep fighting. All of a sudden there are philosopers, preachers, and friends who don’t have the right answer; people in the thick of their nature’s desires are likely to make the decision without asking for help. They don’t need it. What they head is to find out what their nature is asking of them or those around them, and find a personally satisfactory cope. This will be a study in impulses and until one is convinced that the truest qualities of mother nature are reflected.

All right, I’ve done more than answer the first question. I have provided so many answers that I forgot that I never actually clarified anything about this entry so I’m going to try to do it before I pass out right here on my keyboard. We all deal differently with the forces inside us, even the way we acknowledge “forces” and how we define “inside” ourselves. We do it all so differently, and mother nature seems to have set it up so that “nature” is never the always-friend or always-terror, and so there’s set rule “Say yes/no to nature”  I can only assume she likes it this way, as it creates a balance in her friendships with us. So perhaps - if only in that sense - she likes mankind. But She — nature…. She likes the system. She likes the process. Her very breath is carried on in the process. And I respect the process. As such, I respect every approach, every belief, and every attempt at moving forward in life, as I hold to my oft-criticised mantra, “We are all trying.”

It is a natural talent I have that I can write parables from nature. I see situations very often reflected in “what-is” - a collection of already completed processes, more like cyclic moves.  I do believe that if one can locate himself or herself at any point on a cycle, mother nature’s wisdom will use the history of her work to show you the way. Whether that way be to run. fight, give in, wait it out. She’ll know. And I haven’t found her to be one who withholds the solutions from any seekers.

Perhaps God is trying to say something through this. Perhaps He is saying, these are all the answers you need on earth.  Love me, but I am in your life serving another purpose altogether. Maybe God is saying I built this for you, so that you would have an understanding - so that you would have nature as a friend, muse, and mother.

So these are some thoughts for tonight. Glad no one’s reading them because I’m one-hour into a pill that was supposed to induce sleep pretty quick.

We all have that little voice that waits for any opening and whispers depressing things. There’s no real poitn to me saying this except to say I would feel like a fraud if I said “I’ve struggled with depression all my life.”

Ever since I began approaching adulthood, I’ve dealt with that voice. And I don’t believe there are real adults who haven’t conversed with that damn thing pretty regularly. At any given moment it’s whispering “This is too hard; you’d be better off dead.” And at any given moment I’m translating it to myself with different emphases: “I’d love to sleep for 10 years,” “My entire future stability depends on whether I can marry someone for their money,” “God please make me invisible,” “It’s my turn isn’t it? Is it my turn?” etc. These words are a reflection of my callousness - believe it or not, they are neutralizing the message that depression sends.

And there you have it. Human desperation and one more coping mechanism: translation.

I am part of a broad legacy in which those who have gone before me have dismissed all mental disease, addiction, and actually any illness they can’t see with their eyes (i.e. dental cavities) as non-issues.

My aunt Patrice was the most extreme example in the family. Frequently taken in by people who preyed on naive and sincere faith, her ever-changing views were thrust upon the rest of us with relative pushiness.  No one can say she wasn’t true to her beliefs. I don’t remember all the causes of her failing health toward the end. She had breast cancer that spread all over her body; she spent her last years with her arm in a sling with an open wound that had to be cleaned regularly. Her teeth were rotting, and she always took Breath Asure geltabs which weren’t fixing the problem. My mother tried to take her to the hospital toward the end, and she threated to jump out of the car onto the freeway. We still think she would have done it; Mom turned the car around. In the last few months her faith allowed her to accept medical help. But she was just too far gone.

My father is unwittingly upholding the same belief system as Patrice, albeit to a much lesser degree. I can tell he tries not to let his irrational fear of doctors and medication run his life, but they do. Look, there’s not a lot a could say about my family with this. My father’s own health is my primary concern. Secondary is how his behaviors have affected the rest of us for so many years. Third is my general dismay with his turning up his nose at the medications that I admit I need. And I’m confused, because my own mother takes more medicine than anyone I know, and always has.

So. I wonder. I wonder about bipolar disorder and whether it’s really just a hallmark of weak character. Is ADD a sign of low self-discipline? Is insomnia a result of an unbalanced work/home life? Is drug addiction just self-enslavement to drugs? Is obsessive compulsive disorder a choice, motivated by a sense of insecurity?

Just as Christians do not like to bear the stigma of those who have abused its message, people with psychiatric ailments can tell you that some of the “sick” are not sick at all, and that those cases should not be the measuring stick for real sufferers.

No matter what side you lean toward, there is a very concrete separation between impulse and choice. If my impulse is to turn this door handle 3 times before I open it, I do have a choice whether to let OCD govern that movement. But I ask - if everyone could just say no to those impulses, there would never have been a disease so well established in popular culture as well as medical documentation. There has to be something else that compels the sufferer to act.

It is psychiatric pre-school, a knee-jerk response of the outsider, to attribute that disconnect to a weak character. Perhaps the person doesn’t have the self-confidence to fight their impulses. Maybe they think they *ought* to be controlled by irrational behavior, in much the same was as superstition has given an odd comforting feeling to the same.  Maybe there is too much fear of what would happen if there was not complete obedience to the impulse, maybe they want attention, maybe they are not trying.

It is with those theories in mind that I wonder about Scientology and other belief systems which might advocate the betterment of self over “a pill.” I wonder if either one is making any real headway.

Here’s where I stand right now. I had a professor once who criticized my brother’s ADD medicating, saying, “I’ve got ADD but I don’t need to take medicine. I have learned the self-discipline of fighting ADD.” <em>What is it that makes people feel superior about doing things the hard way, fighting their body’s chemistry, and acting as though the mind cannot have diseases?</em> What makes a brain so different from any other organ, that it is immune to real disease? Part of me wants to scream, “Then you don’t have ADD! If you did have it, you wouldn’t be able to talk yourself out of it!” And of course, there’s what my family suffers from: Pill Fear. I had a roommate once who would let a headache go for 48 hours before she decided she ought to take a Tylenol. She was afraid to take medication at the onset… or any time soon after, it appears. Some part of her was convinced that experiencing the pain was a more beneficial situation for her. Sometimes that’s true in life, but I think most people agree that it’s not a universal rule.

Many people fear antidepressants because they think that they will mask problems that need to be dealt with. THEY WILL NOT SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS. Antidepressants will not change your situations, your relationships, or your beliefs. If you are worried about those things hiding themselves away from you, you need to know that Prozac isn’t cocaine, it’s not morphine and it’s not a trip to a desert island. Depression is the trip.

Interestingly, if we use the trip metaphor, perhaps the behaviors of the diseased are simply good preparation. Before I go anywhere, I pack my bags. Certainly depression leads one to pack up compartments of their lives. I also check the oven, twice - obsessive compulsion instructs you to behave irrationally on the off-off chance that something might go wrong and it would be your fault. (Perhaps then OCD would be one of the hardest diseases to get people to accept prescriptions for - they don’t want a problem to escalate “behind their backs” while they were medicated.) If I were going to a deserted island, I would tell my family I loved them - I would tell them in excess, because I don’t know when I’m coming back. Bipolar disorder drives loving relationships to extremes, both with love and with hatred. From what I’ve seen, the hatred is usually a reaction to an insecurity and a fear that perhaps the diseased is the more loving of the two. When I go on a trip, I think of ways to pass the time that I wouldn’t otherwise use; things I consider fun and extravagant. Alcoholism and drug use might be the most literal interpretatin of this metaphor.

The question is…. if we all eventually need to escape, who *doesn’t” have some of these diseases lying dormant in them? Aren’t all these ailments triggered somehow? I have epilepsy, and there is a song that triggers my seizures. What if that song had never been written? Would I be less epileptic, or would I just not have symptoms, or would my mind find another trigger? I never had a seizure before I was exposed to a trigger, right? If I had you do an experiment in which you did 5 shots of jager a night for 2 months, would you be somewhat alcoholic afterward? Do you think it would depend on whether you saw alcohol as your ticket out of here? Don’t we all just want a ticket out?

In one sense, I do think it’s human nature to assign meaning to something that in and of itself has none. Cocaine is just a powder. Food is just nourishment. Sex is a physical motion. But if we are all looking for escape routes, we’re going to call drugs, food, and sex addictions; in short, we are saying, I am tired of looking for a ticket out. I have decided this is my ticket, and I am going to continue to pursue it until I am convinced otherwise.

Perhaps sensible people would realize quickly that their escape route was not helping them escape in any real sense. Is that what all you “sensible” people think? That desperation would never lead you to do something irrational? Am I saying all those with mental illness are desperate? I don’t know. I have said before that I cannot imagine an adult who isn’t somehow desperate for relief from life.

The argument is starting to look pretty one-sided. Despite eschewing all self-disciplinary approaches, I seem to be saying that addictions are really just reactive behaviors. Reactive to forces which are imaginary, emotional, situational, physical, or even supernatural. A choice, conscious or unconscious, to pin hope where hope doesn’t belong.

Then where does hope belong? If sexually-initialized endorphins are an addictive chemical, then wouldn’t there be addictions to roller coasters, friendships, music? If people seek escape through performing obsessive behaviors, then wouldn’t they also seek it through performing other behaviors at church, school, work, malls? In a sense - yes.

We often cope by building routines we can enjoy. Often when those routines get to an unhealthy point, we are reluctant to accept that it is the very thing we are pursuing which is causing unhappiness. So we stay with the abusive boyfriend, because it was going so well at first, and this was going to be our ticket out. We sign on for another year at our job because this was going to be “the” job. And we just keep on trucking to every church function because church was the pinnacle of healthy escape routes, and it was going to be a haven and a source of friendship and inspiration.

But you are not perfect or even ideal; you are flawed. Idealism has never been a solution for humans; humans have never, ever, ever been ideal. Here is a short list of things that will not cause perfection: time, therapy, medicine, church, friendship, sex, alcohol, ADD, ADD medicine, rehab, good relationships, art, music, expression, school, happiness, beauty, prayer, faith, patience, character, hope, proper diagnosis, family, seclusion, popularity, direction, self-esteem, healthy eating, exercise, yoga, meditation, knowledge, seeking.

I don’t know what’s a real disease and what’s not. There are a lot of people out there who just refuse to stop drinking even though they know they could. There are a lot of people who are unable to stop. These categories make people different, but they do not designate either as a superior condition. Some people need help controlling the impulses which drive them to certain behaviors. Some people need help controlling their choices in reaction to their impulses. Again, neither situation makes for a better or more valuable problem than the other. Sometimes our weakness causes us to see a mirage. Sometimes we’re actually hallucinating. I don’t know exactly how we lose ourselves.

There has to be a big picture. That’s the first conclusion I can draw from the way time and individuality seem to work together.

It may not actually be a fascinating topic, but I find it endlessly educational.

For years I’ve watched makeovers on television without remembering an experience I had in junior high school. But one show I saw today triggered the memory of another show (which has also never called up this memory before), and all of a sudden I’m in the 7th grade, getting passed over for a makeover for local commercial. (FYI, my cheerleading squad was doing a spot for a hair salon, and I was going to be the hair makeover. Another one of the cheerleaders showed up that afternoon and they replaced me.) It made me a little bit sad. Not the right-now kind of sad, but the childhood pain kind. And I HAVE TO ASK. Why are experiences culumative?

It doesn’t make sense, right?

It’s all set up like a lifelong college program. You work and work, and never quite know what for. You’re just hoping it’s going to get you somewhere beneficial - somewhere that creates more independence for you, or more comfort for other people.

To be specific, years are like classes, and the information in every one builds on the stuff you learned in the last class. But it’s most likely the experience itself of having been in college for four years that gives you the capacity to understand your senior capstone course.

Why then would each person be an incomplete record of life? And if we are incomplete records, what is the purpose of giving us intense, temporary tastes of experience? And then, why build the entire structure of our lives and good fortune around the fall-where-it-may of each of our experiences, only to make them inaccessible once we can see clearly their far-reaching effects?

Why give me a memory of all the random misfortune I’ve had, and infer that it is due to my choices? I get to make choices, but I don’t get to plan my life. Proof of this lies in every failed plan I’ve ever made. If I am an incomplete record of the nature of a life, I cannot possibly be expected to make a right choice, ever. Because it is generally conceded that we can only truly know that which we have experienced. Why bother learning anything? All it can do is give you regret. It isn’t going to change your future; it’s only going to help you make a better plan. But as I said, I don’t get to plan my life. Other people aren’t going to benefit from my experiences - I cannot plan their lives, and I cannot transfer to them the kind of knowing that comes from experience. All I can do is give them a soft outline of what might have been a favorable outcome.

Given that my major frustration here seems to be the inability to know the future, it’s nice to think that my experiences might offer a psychic glimpse into the future of anyone seeking my advice.

But knowledge and good planning don’t control …anything, really. They make for a greater sense of security, which I KNOW is an illusion. I can’t prove to you that I know that, but it comes from my experiences.

Another positive effect of the setup of life as an individual is that some experiences ARE repeated across different lives. So if you and I have experienced the very same thing, we’ve got wonderful odds of knowing some of the same things, and this gives us greater opportunity for communication, exploration, and learning. Perhaps we could develop a close enough trust that we could somehow *know* one another’s experiences. Seems a little mystical, maybe? But I am not above mystical. I rather revel in it from time to time.

My identity is the unhappy beneficiary of my entire personal history. When I look back, all I can see is the negative. I don’t think that makes me a pessimist; I don’t think it’s even on the same page as that kind of label. The negative experiences have shaken me. They’ve caused me to become aware of my fragility, insecurity, and limits. In short, they’ve humbled me. And so every time I think of myself, I am humbled. I am fragile. I am insecure.

Why do my successes feel so temporary? I don’t think that’s an error in the *way I think* or any such self-empowering point of view. If I am to believe my peers, the feeling is too universally pervasive to be a sign of a personal fault. We just believe that we are to blame - because we are humbled by our memories of self.

I think the positive experiences might be lacking in power. I know for sure, they lack *staying* power. Feelings rarely last as long as we think they do. I think most feelings are surprisingly fleeting. It’s the memory and the effect of those feelings that gives them power, and I can think of very few positive feelings that have really made their mark.

That’s not to say there are none; they’ve been bold and abundant in my experience - they just haven’t been numerous. And their effect has been to calm me, to offer me a sense of security, and through their light, manage to outshine my constant regret. But I know they won’t last long enough to take care of me 24/7. And as cliche as it might sound - in that way, they also humble me.

So I suppose I am but a humble and incomplete record of the experience of living.

I think you ought to remember that next time you ask anything of yourself. We can plan to do just that. But will you follow through? Not likely. Will I? No.

So humility won’t change your life. Which seems to be the nature of a positive emotion.

It’s not with any hopelessness that I rifle through these thoughts. It all comes from the sense that although we all suffer setbacks and loss of control, it seems unfair to make them cumulative.

In my imagination, I spent a moment with amnesia. I indulged in the fantasy that the entirety of my personality was lost, and I had to regain it by reading everything I’d ever written. Then I had to explain myself… And I couldn’t. I heard myself say, “I know I seem sort of empty. I’m just a collection of words now. Which is probably what happens when someone loses their entire lifetime of experience.”

Kind of a cool tiny moment of realization.

I hope you don’t think this is the part where I get all sunflowers and what not.

True. With the oddly ordered history that has become my identity, I suffer. And it seems like 90% of it is unnecessary; if life wanted me to suffer, it could have just left me without a memory. Then it would get the pleasure of my surprise every time a new and awful thing happened to me, which let’s admit, is pretty frequently. I strongly suspect it’s that way for all of us.

Still, memory seems to compound suffering or regret more than it amplifies any other kind of experience. Still, it doesn’t seem like the most effective method of causing suffering. What I am saying is, I suspect that life’s purpose is not one of causing varied and individualized cases of suffering. It’s a suspicion that I could easily kill if I thought enough about it. But this suspicion offers hope. And I KNOW from my experiences that any time hope is a viable option, I ought to take it and not look back. See how this is all coming together? That’s because I’m in like my 16th experiential capstone course.

My daydream helped me think of things from another angle. Life experience - like it or not - creates interesting individuals. It gives me the privelege of all the things that last, like friendship and love. Love would not be fully functional, I believe, in a world without suffering. Which is not the same truth you hear in church, although it is worded almost the same, right? Your pastor says it in the rote way, and in the way that faith indicates is the most beneficial for its own survival and the survival of its ascribers. My assertion comes entirely from everything you’ve read here, in this one simple essay. Off topic, I’m a little paranoid about being associated with Christian arguments, because since I am a Christian it is often assumed that I have signed up for the whole shebang and done it with my eyes closed, which is increasingly untrue about me - increasingly.

The memory of suffering creates an interesting human being. The seeming randomization of these experiences fosters dialog. Our cumulative and possibly unique reactions to them give us the potential to build intimate relationships. Pan out to see this process repeated ad infinitum. There really has to be a big picture, right? It’s a viable theory. Especially since I have just so excellently argued that the details cause the picture to be interesting.

I’m glad it plays into my belief that everything knowable is already parallelled in created things. What I’ve just stated is an essential rule of good art. Is it possible, then, that as the Bible says, we are God’s poema, his truthful work of art?

Does this answer the question of human suffering? Like, not even, at all. I didn’t attempt to approach it; it might seem like I did, but remember this is about a cumulative human history that can be experienced by the parts but not the whole, and thus can never be fully experienced by anything. Why? And time… the way time seems to govern the whole thing but never bend itself low to interact with it. Why?

I will say this. I always suspect there is a better way to teach than to cause suffering. Which flies in the face of Christian doctrine, or what you may have been led to believe is the way God works. I’ll let you know if I find out anything else. But as a secondary method, it’s been effective for me in more than a few non-regrettable ways. It’s also given me insight into the truth about suffering. You could argue that in a world without suffering, that’s a truth we wouldn’t have much use for. I hear that. But I think I’m saying that being an active participant in life is probably my #1 driving force, which means I’d like to fully participate in whatever sick or beautiful game life is playing with us.