I guess I've been building up to this rant for awhile. It being too big to write on the fly and I thinking not everyone will share my world/life views, this is being prewritten before being posted. If I even do post it. Now, the purpose of this rant. There are those who say I don't do it enough. Others don't really know me well enough to find that I should. I've been toying around with a lot of life thoughts in my head. Some sounds like excuses for choices I've made and maybe they are. However, everyone has excuses even when they say they have none. Excuses for good and for bad. It varies from religious views to personal relationships. I lack the intelligence of higher learning, so I admit, I do not claim to know everything. I only know my point of view. And I've had it for awhile and it's the only thing I know for a surety about myself. This is written to neither offend or berate those around me. Instead, to give those a better idea of the person I am.
1- religious beliefs: just to get this out of the way first, I'm spiritual but not religious. It's an over used phrase. Not really agnostic because in a small way everyone is. No one knows what exists for a fact. They have their gathered experiences and ideals to come to the conclusion that's seems reasonable enough to guide their lives by. And even when they have those beliefs, no one follows to the letter of it. And that's ok. We are a world of imperfections. From what I've gathered from theology, through out my life, the main 2 things that everything has in common is to
1-be a good person
2- be a good person to others.
IF God fails to exist, then that means I am the master of my own life, experience, moral compass, actions towards myself and others. Brought up in a religious house, this was obviously called free will. And I've been painfully aware of it's reality since childhood. Not by my free will but of others. IF God fails to exist, then that means we either choose to live for ourselves or live in the service of others. And the conflict between selfishness and selflessness of those who do express religious beliefs always confused me. I've stopped questioning the place it has in my life because the things I question do not come with answers, only positive and negative influences that I have been taught throughout my life. I, myself, am selfish but I try to live selflessly in order to strive to be a good person in my mind. This brings about drama but joy as well. I see it as a way of being whole spiritually. Light and dark must coexist in order for all thoughts to take root into actions. Without light, anyone trapped in the dark will not be able to fathom joy, love, compassion....basically empathy. The dark holds only the opposite. Yet, without the dark, anyone living wholly in the light will seem too naive to trials and being able to truly understand how hard it is to find a glint of light in a pitch black situation. And, if no one is aware of themselves, they will most likely choose one or the other. Never both. I strive to encourage the light and face the dark. As a spiritual person, I'm grateful. I have moments where the trials of my own life and that of others tend to lead me down to the dark corners in my head but knowing the light I have a chance of weathering it the best way I can without being consumed by it. Those who have done this know it's never an easy feat. I believe that I must be all things in order to be whole. Good, bad, happy, sad...if I lack but one thing because I feel that it serves no purpose, then I feel I would have cheated being myself.
2- Love: like faith, this is simply an emotion of perception. No one idea of love is the same. And everyone holds love in different regards with different people. Some believe that once you find love in one person, that should be shared with that person alone. Monogamy, friendships, family. All creatures of a constructed idea that loyalty is the root of love. And as beautiful and trying that is, I cannot believe this is so. I believe love to be a necessary virus. That we are born with it to spread to those who need it. To those who crave it. To those who have yet used their own idea of love and desperately crave someone else to show them the description. Not just sexually but unconditionally. And this creates conflict of the soul. Especially when we force our minds and suppress our hearts to show that love on one singular facet. To love is to lose oneself completely in the possibility that it's vast and it's easy to get lost in. Moments of infidelity. Moments of torn emotional turmoil plays it's toll. Picking who to love and why you love them and what you would do for that person because you love them is insanity. But we all crave it. I believe that love is made to validate war or at least calm the tremors that it brings about. It's a chemical balance of things we've subjected ourselves to feel through habit and example. We create the brand of love that we give others and we seek that brand in hopes that other have the same or at least similar brand so we can feel the comfort of home with someone else. The feeling of safety, the feeling of rest, the feeling of realness, the feeling of acceptance, the feeling of truth, the feeling of comfort, the feeling of life and the feeling of fighting when love is deemed worthy of fighting for. This is my brand. I give it freely with the price that I will be questioned in where my love truly lies. It's scattered about freely like breadcrumbs. And if someone finds me at the end of that trail, I'll be ****** if I created that journey for them for nothing.
3- service/friendship/family: when I was younger, I though friends were the gold of my life. Irreplaceable and unable to be made the same twice. I use my friends to create the persona I've grown since youth. I am those who have love me and hated me. I am those who inspire me and depress me. I am those who fought for me and fought against me. If I feel that I'm flawed I search for others with these flaws. If I can help or even be the catalyst of my friends to overcome their flaws, then I have a shot of overcoming mine. My friends are proof that I'm not alone even in the moments where I wish I was. Even those I choose to be "unworthy" of my friendship, I cannot help but show them the courtesy of friendship. They are the reason why I stay alive in hopes that if I cannot help myself then there are those in need of me....hopefully. My family is, in a way, very tight knit. They are what molded my sense of dedication and perception that I bring into the outside world of society. They are the jokes I tell. They are the tears I've shed. They are the hugs I give. They are the noise I've screamed out of anger. They are the pillars in which I've stood on to weather the strains of being an individual. Wether the examples were good or bad, they were always the educators of my emotions. And there's a bitter sweetness that comes with that. The feeling that one must rise to an expectation and risk the crushing reality that, I alone, may not be able to rise to the challenge. It's hard to break away from those who raised you and create your own family in combined reasons with strangers around you. Or to create a family and come to find out they will only part ways from you after some time. To me, friends old and new, gone or present, they are always family. I could not have pieced myself together as the person I am today were it not for those who willingly gave pieces of themselves to me. And by me, they are loved.
4- Judgements: this one is always a sensitive one for me because I'm guilty of judgement. I've found myself many times giving the side glance at others and feeling like my thoughts are better than theirs. My theory is, if one has enough attention to pick out the flaws and cracks of people then they too possess the ability to pick out the gems in them as well. And it's difficult to do this when one is trapped in their own mind of "what's acceptable and what's abhorred. Homosexuality, deformities, drug addicts, mental illnesses, bad attitudes, poor management in a work force, dumb choices made by friends and family, someone who cuts you off in traffic, worldwide tales made by those who don't want the truth of matters to be revealed, politicians, other races, WHATEVER! We live in a time where life is taboo. Differences are mocked instead of celebrated due to our lack of living outside of ourselves and really put in the time to live in someone else's head. We justify our judgement by feeling so secure that we are always right and that other simply don't know any better. And deep down this makes us angry. Or to me, it does. And it should. We use are judgements as a safety net of our insecurities. We use them to feel that our lives are more significant than those we figure are wasting the time and air we greedily consume. We use it to feel pride in killing others in battle and deem it with a sense of patriotism or a mark of gaining hierarchy in are status but for what? Those who hide behind religious walls will or wealth or self serving thoughts will never know the joy of finding a stranger and making them a working cog in the life we're lucky to have. And it's sad that one must pursue past the nay sayers just to find that voice of reason that tells you, " you're imperfect but that's what I love about you."
Maybe it's the zen influences that I've recently encountered in my life or maybe these are thoughts that I've always had but due to stress and tragedy, I never was able to put this into words. Maybe fear that I know...by my words nothing will change according to my own perspective. However, if you made it this far into reading this, I'm grateful that you did. And I write with the intent, not to change how you think, yet, to make you think all the same. Life is too short and the human mind has too much potential to be wasted on a monotonous life that we believe will grant us happiness. There is so much more out there. And if you don't have the funds to travel or the friends that inspire you or the words that resonate within you, you have a mind that can sense life in all it's forms and all you need to do is use it. I love you guys