There is a peculiar exhaustion that comes from maintaining a reality some deeper part of you no longer believes. You can learn to live with the contradictions, explain away the inconsistencies, and keep moving through the machinery of everyday life, but the questions remain. Perhaps the greater discomfort isn’t discovering that something you believed was untrue. Perhaps it’s realizing how much of yourself you invested in believing it.
Category: Journal Entries
thoughts, ponderings, experiences and lessons learned. or, something deep and life-changing.
We spend so much of our lives trying to arrive somewhere other than where we are. We measure the present against what we remember, what we expected, or what we imagine might yet come, rarely considering that nothing essential has gone missing in the meantime. Perhaps the invitation was never to perfect the circumstances of our lives, but to become present enough to recognize what has been unfolding through them all along.
Perhaps the most difficult thing to reconcile when confronting illness, especially cancer, is the possibility that we have misunderstood not only disease, but ourselves. We have inherited countless ideas about what the body is, what it is capable of, what threatens it, and where its authority ultimately resides. Yet beneath those accumulated narratives is something quieter and considerably older: an intelligence that has accompanied us from the beginning, asking very little except that we stop long enough to remember it.
There comes a point when trying to reach more people begins to interfere with reaching the right people. What we create, discover, and offer in earnest does not need to resonate with everyone, nor should we expect it to. There is a certain freedom in recognizing that our task may simply be to put forth what feels true and worthwhile, as clearly and authentically as we can, and allow those who are ready for it to find their way there.
We were promised that technology would return something to us. Time, freedom, ease, perhaps even a greater capacity to live. Yet somewhere between the promise and the implementation, the tools became obligations, convenience became compliance, and the hours they were meant to save disappeared into the machinery required to keep them functioning.