Life offers us so much to play with. Our challenge, after a while, is to be open to the unknowns, beyond the hurts and seemingly empty places.
As a child, we approach things, usually, with reckless abandon and complete presence. Moment to moment, everything is everything and nothing is off limits… We simply don’t “know” any “better” yet.
Gradually, we adopt boundaries and barriers and rules and ideologies. We glean them from our parents or guardians, from our institutions, and from our countless subtle and overt external influences.
But these constructs are very shakeable and mostly transparent. We bash into each other along the journey, and with that comes cracks and fissures in our previously resolute perspectives. Interests and passions and desires infuse us with depth and breadth and typically introduce us to the broader implications of love and violence and pain.
Consequently, another phase of the artist emerges. We choose to express, or suppress; to create, or destroy; to keep, or to throw away. On and on again, we refine our existence and hone our sensemaking and meanings through the dynamic proportions of a life being lived.
What, is the matter, with you; your very nature, your identity, is the construct; the nexus, the cosmic made physical — with an ever-changing, ever-expanding, never-satisfied, yet transitory individuation.
Well, duh, right?
We put a lot of stock in appearances and first impressions. We put a lot of undue trust in our oldest habits, beliefs, reactions, and long-relied-upon structures. We bring a lot of fear-based nonsense forward from generations passed.
We tend to rely too much on what’s fragile, and fragmented, and merely superficial. We tend to rely more on negative spirals than positive momentum. In a world where the collective has a bias toward the dark side, that is what we resonate with most readily. That is what (the presumed nature of this reality’s identity) we trust.
We simply don’t know any better yet.
But we’re beginning to, yes?
Solvitur ambulando