It’s those people that have gone before you that give you a dash of hope concerning the path. Sometimes you don’t even know who they are, but there is always the sense that things could be much darker or even a bit more bright.
What is this awkward between we seem to traverse? Somewhere on the spectrum of hope and hell. I can’t seem to shake the fact that life is a paradox, I guess? As soon as you get to that place on the path, the long off distant horizon, the sooner you find that the ones who went before were only exaggerating—painting the situation in light of their experience. Marriage is just okay, your dream job is still a job, have kids be tired for life and make sure you buy a house—or something like that. You know, I even hate the word ‘experience’ for this very instance—it makes you feel like you should know something after it happens, whatever it may be. I have always thought, based on my ‘experience’, that to know something is to be known by it. That the pseudo-arrival points in life are characterized by a deep intentioned knowledge that you come to concerning the world, the people you love and suffering. To love is to be known, to beloved is know something.
But I think knowledge is a category that is loosing its edge. I can gather knowledge on my iPhone and blog thoughts into the world via a simple upload but this kind of knowing has nothing to do with the deep, most penetrating, tactile contours of who we are as people. I venture to say I know nothing when you really strip the lofty arrogance of theological mambojambo and the closed selfish sights of what I hope for. I know little at best. But here’s the thing, I trust people, I believe my friends. I see differently the depths of a person when I hope in them—knowing them beyond their fears and aches, the stuff of trust. Now I’m sure this probably describes something someone wrote concern love languages or something like that, but I think this sort of thing is bigger than dissection or easily translated systems that measure people as if humans are simple things nicely dialed into certain ways of being.
Here is where I am going with this. Life is much harder than I ever thought possible, and I have an easy life. Shit happens, and you grieve and you ache and you wonder if you could change things and you even try to change things, but fail. But life is made up of entropedic cycles where you find yourself dying and living all at once. And its good, it is worth trusting. And people, those ahead or behind, need you as much as you need them—we are the cairns of the cosmos—pointing people home.
