February 28, 2010

• Where’s my head?

  Sometimes I think my mind is like a study, and there are two characters in it always having a dialogue.  One is an elderly gentleman sitting completely composed in a grand armchair.  He’s wearing an immaculately designed three-piece suit, has his legs crossed, and knows all the answers.  He is calm, cool, and collected. 

  Then across from him is a man wearing a mismatched suit, frantically pacing around the room screaming “We must live! We must live!”  He is always nervous and running his hands through his hair, leaving the entire thing a collosal mess.  His emphatic hand gestures do the most to communicate his meaning as he screams, “What are all these books? Who cares? We were put into the world to live ourselves, not just read and read the dead words of others!”

  Normally the dignified man has a slight grin on his face as a reaction to the antics of the frantic man.  Every now and then he’ll throw in the occasional comment as he keeps his fingertips pressed together, “Interesting to hear someone to decry the value of words with a perfectly formed English sentence.” 

  While it does feel like these two characters are there, it also seems like I must not actually be them if I can talk about them like they are distinct from me.  Am I not on the scene as a third party?  Perhaps I am in-between them, listening to them, trying to counsel the two into some kind of agreement; but unfortunately the two speak different languages, and there is no middle ground between the different universes.

  There’s that image, or there’s the angry parliament version, where after one thought there always comes a roar of dissent and commotion from the surrounding commentators.  And that is the dignified version of the image of my mind as a fight in a bar where different thoughts vie for prominance in a sort of senseless melee.   In those cases I would be the prime minister trying to bring the house to order, or the bartender trying to stop men who are much bigger than me from fighting.

  This captures one thing that seems true about our thoughts and living life as a mind: in one sense it seems like our thoughts just happen to us, but in another sense we are there to choose what to do about our thoughts, which ones to listen to, which ones to get rid of.  We are the arbiter between warring factions in a way. 

  And if life really is one long dialogue between hope and despair, I think one key result of this realization is to make sure we do not give despair too much air time.  All day long, good things happen, and bad things happen, and it goes back and forth, back and forth.  We are up, we are down; maybe reality will work out after all, oh, but then again, maybe it will not. 

  And of course, sometimes it seems like a bad thing happens that has some sort of deadweight, and we are not allowed to be happy anymore.  Despair is being given air time.  It becomes the theme of life; depression settles in.  But maybe, if we really are this central arbiter, we should be much less patient with this nagging hobgoblin, and try to get him to sit down and shutup a bit more often.  I’m sorry, would the representative from Northtownshire please take his seat, his time is up. 

  Why not find an opportuniy for a joke, or find someone in need of help, or find the people who are singing to that silent symphony of joy that some people seem to have secretly discovered, and try to pick up the tune.  For despair is a part of life, but if Resurrection really is the wider narrative of the universe, then certainly we ought to go after it with all our might.  Hope and despair dialogue back and forth; what if hope is right?  If we are just in life to see how we will react to it, shouldn’t that be who we listen to? 

  So as for now .  . .  I’ll watch the glint in my eye shine of the spring in my step, and it could be blinding depending on the amount of You that I reflect!

  • 1:08 am
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