Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Dec. 2012


Musing, wondering if everyone lives in a small private hell.  If that is why we all spend our days working so committedly on other people’s chores, telling ourselves it is for the greater good, telling ourselves it means something that we do this.  

What does mean something is that we don’t sit alone with ourselves, our fear, our lack of self-esteem.  In fact, we live through others, using another’s, either employers’ or children’s or spouse’s, goals and plans to make meaning in our own lives.  This makes sense, in a sad way, seeing the horrors in the land - children massacred, mayhem on poor streets and in far off lands at war, even in places at peace where mores, simple custom, prevents full personhood to all.  

How does this happen?  Why do we persist in fashion, custom, tradition that cuts into the sinews of humanity.  Woven together, we become twisted up together into knots of little fascist thoughts of control and pride and honor.

Maybe this is my own private hell.  My little selfish life.  Reading, thinking, despairing.  I spend my time distracted with these things rather than with engagement with others, because I cannot fully enter into most forms of fellowship, cannot find it in myself to believe that the things we generally do together are real, honest, true, believably valuable.  Except for the briefest of moments.  In tiny encounters with others, openly shared or not, are quick glimpses of paradise here on earth, even in the midst of the loud, awful noise of our allegedly modern world.  These alone are what sustain me.

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