September 26, 2011
-
At your darkest
You know your life is too big when you can’t remember what you said to who.
Money is something you should think about as little as possible. It’s only meant for the actually good things. Don’t let your mind forget and crave for it incessantly as though it were itself good.
Sometimes stories take a long time. A man went into the woods to chop down a tree every day because of how angry he was at his wife. Every chop was another wish for her demise. Then after a few years he is chopping and chopping and chopping and finally he slumps down in front of the tree and cries. The day after that he goes into the woods to the giant pile of trees he has chopped and over the next few weeks he builds a cabin and he takes her there and says ‘I didn’t know it but I chopped all this wood so that I would find that I love you’.
But if you were by him, and saw him go into the woods, would you go into the woods and lecture him? But you – who are you? Can you teach a man as well as ten thousand days of chopped trees?
Sometimes I feel like everything gets switched over real fast and it’s not really fair. I’ll be talking to someone and they’ll say ‘I want to know everything about other cultures and people’ and they seem to think life is such a big thing. So then I will think ‘They’re right and I should act like life is a big thing all the time’. But then I’ll talk to someone else and we won’t really talk about anything and if I try to they look at me like I’m strange and life is not a big thing. Then I think, wait, everything just switched. Is life a big thing or not? How come it seems that what I should believe seems to have changed, just like that? I guess some people just don’t think life is a big thing. But life I always think is a big thing because it’s about you and what you’ll do with your life and if you will see how God fills the world and how you will respond to him, and if it’s like that, then everyone should think that it’s a big thing otherwise they’ll be doing a really big thing – life – without knowing they’re doing it. And how can someone be doing something they don’t know they’re doing?
How many friends do you have where you have noticed changes in seasons of their lives? That’s how many people you have a true intimacy with, an inside look at their subtle changes of attitude and action.
I think it is worth seeing people through different seasons. Maybe you can just be there for someone – no words, just being there, an understanding, or maybe just a hope – and after many years they will drop their ax, slump down in front of the dented tree, and you can kneel beside them, and after they have finished weeping you can help them up and start building the cabin with them.
And maybe that’s what it means to love someone at their darkest.
Comments (10)
your thoughts pick at my brain. in a very good way. i always look forward to your posts
. i swear, if i had a conversation with you my life would change forever because you’d be lighting up all those dark corners of my mind and changing how i see EVERYTHING. my thought process used to be so insightful, but nothing like this.
I am guilty of your first sentence. Often I can’t remember who I talked to about what. :-/ Probably in this post-college life it will be easier to deepen friendships instead of having many shallow ones.
@dooE -
i’m very glad you can connect with anything i write. most of the time i post things i’m thinking ‘everyone’s going to read this and just think i’m really weird and then leave’. so thanks.
@Linley_K -
it’s scary though too, because i wonder how making friends ends up working when you aren’t in a school setting.
i read an article in a campus newspaper over the summer about quarter life crises, and the author made a distinction between friends of character and friends of convenience. i like that. i like to think i love all my friends, but really it is bad to not really commit to helping a few of them, to be available for them in particular.
and yet, there are so many people in the world. sigh.
Did you really post those replies at 4:22 AM???
@Linley_K -
lol yeah. i typically go to bed around six thirty.
don’t you ever look at the times on my posts?
Are you nocturnal? Working a night shift? On a different time zone? Being Sarcastic? …I have never noticed your post times until today. And aren’t you still in college? So many questions!!!
@Linley_K -
pretty much the first two…. around the summer after my junior year in high school something started happening. the natural time for me to go to sleep became around six, and then i would wake up at one or two. ever since then if i don’t have anything i have to do, that’s what my sleep schedule tends to gravitate toward.
i also work night shifts at my job occasionally, which is convenient. it’s just like the day time for me.
i always thought this was really apparent. the internet at midnight? i’ve had this blog since about junior year of high school when i started being a nocturnalist. it’s not just a gimmick!!
i’m taking a few web classes, but that’s about it.
and let me just say . . . the night is great. it means island living . . . do a little reading, watch some movies, make food, think about life, take walks, sit on the porch . . . and all under a blanket of serenity that calms the spirit and clears the mind. the night is a wonderful thing, and i can’t believe people schedule their lives around missing it. if my life gets out of whack, i know i haven’t stayed up late enough recently.
not to mention there are some bands you can only listen to at night.
aahhhh. ok, that makes sense.
I usually stay up until at least 2 or 3am. I love the night as well. ….but you even named your blog after it, “The Internet at Midnight.” Sheesh! Sometimes I’m a little dense!
@Linley_K -
don’t worry. yesterday i played clue, and in my formal accusation, the one to win the game, i guessed a card i had in my hand. we all have our lows.