Collections

I’ve spent the past week getting rid of my stuff. Yeah a lot of it was junk, but there were some treasures in there. They just wouldn’t fit into our new little house. They weren’t functional for our new city lifestyle, they’d just clutter up the place, keep us from getting the most out of living in the city. So we had to make some tough calls, and let loose of things we’ve collected from around the world. Truthfully, I feel better.

I think most of us spend our lives trying to collect—people, experiences, things—but they aren’t really ours, and they don’t last. Times and people change. The second we start thinking of some place, some thing or someone as our own, it loses something, we lose something. We aren’t supposed to own or touch or name or define everything, we’re just supposed to do our living in the milieu of it all. We’re to enjoy and fight and live and observe and experience and absolutely be engaged with all of it—but we aren’t supposed to hold onto any of it, or use it to get through life.

But we DO--all of us have had experience with holding too tightly, hanging onto someone or some time in our lives, the past or the future. It’s the stuff dreams are made of. We use these things, along with countless other addictions, to get through the hours, trying not to feel the emptiness, pain and difficulty of the present. You would think that the answer would be not to get too attached to people or experiences and live as though you could take it or leave it all—but that is not the answer, trying to live above the pain. Feeling pain is a requirement for living life. I don't know, maybe the answer lies somewhere between feeling all the pain and joy of every attachment, while still maintaining the ability to throw it out when the time comes.

Kind of a bummer really, seeing life as a constant managing of one’s attachments, fears, commitments, highs, lows, emotions and pains. But, if we can see it as being a part of a much bigger LIFE that one gets to observe and feel and be a part of, maybe it can be freeing. We’re there to feel and know beauty and pain, and it IS real, if just for a moment. We’ve got to have the faith to believe it's real--even when ordinary. That’s better than defining, owning and holding onto a good moment, not willing to move from there, afraid it might be too long before the next one shows up.

Alone

I am struck by the aloneness of our existence--we really do almost everything alone. Yes, we get married and we have partners, family and friends, but inside our own brain we decide what we will and will not do. I heard someone say that even when we fall in love we are very alone.

I think we are especially alone when we deal with issues of faith. It’s lonely because no one can tell you what to believe, you have to decide what you’ll swallow. Even if you throw in with a bunch of people or mentally agree with a stable, storied religion that’s been around for centuries, it comes down to you living with the doubts or fears or expectations of it all. Can you buy in? What are you willing to stomach? What do you hope for? What can you expect? Can you sleep at night thinking the world works this way? We manage it all by ourselves.

I used to have a lot of faith and religion, but I gave it all up—too much false certainty in it. Now I have no religion and only a tiny bit of faith, but it’s real, and it’s my own. I know because even though it’s pretty new, I doubted and questioned it hard the other day, and it held. I tried to set it aside and take a look at life apart from the new view of it I’ve gained in light of my new faith, and there was no view at all. I have nowhere else to go.

It took some work to build my faith. I made the choice, alone, to believe God is real. Now I’m choosing to believe that the little bit of faith I’ve built is real, even though there’s no way I can defend it. I think coming through my little faith crisis alone strengthened my faith and now I own it. So I’ve decided to put my head down and continue with my indefensible way, and unlike when I was in Christianity, there’s no one here cheerleading. No one is telling me to just accept it, telling me it’s THE way to live. It’s all on me.

I guess the trail I’m on only has room for one, maybe it’s real steep and narrow. I have to go it alone in this journey of faith and love and all things real, and that’s okay. It’s alot harder than just accepting a doctrine or a belief system with the comfort of a bunch of other people accepting it too, but its working for me. To me it’s incredibly freeing to realize that I get to decide. For me that’s better than being pulled or pushed along by religion, or waiting and hoping someone will help me out.