Heart of Darkness

Going into the interminable jungle of life, a savage society awaits and watches your every step, breath, and utterance. Death wafts in from every direction, always weary of sickness and pain on each path trod and nervous with every call to deck that you might not return. A haze of darkness goes before us, follows behind us, and eventually becomes us. The heart is the gate to our soul and when it is plagued and harangued with continual darkness, it is only a matter of time before one final struggle and push by the darkness engulfs the soul, hopes, dreams, passions, the good along with the bad. It is all swallowed up in a black hole.
Going into Conrad's Congo is not so hard for me to imagine. Not only imagine, but actually walking in the jungle, drinking in the emptiness that surrounded life there. Conrad's Congo is not unlike daily life for some.
A suffusing comment I read takes in stride the universality of the life experience, despite surroundings, situations, etc. I can't find the reference exactly, but he says something along the lines of how work tests us, reveals to us what and who we really are, or at least what we may gain from hard work.
It's true. It is when we are tested in our finest and most delicate faculties to produce something that is desirable by another party, we come to realize what we are currently capable of, what we are potentially capable of, and what we are not capable of. And if we find we are not capable of something, we find that we are capable of turning what we are not capable of into something that we are.
There is potential among the heart of darkness. Largely, there is great knowledge and potential wisdom to churn in the heart of darkness into something desirable and necessary. Never be ungrateful for a moment to walk in Conrad's jungle, which is our jungle. Never for a moment shun the opportunity to walk into the darkest jungle of your heart, for it will see you wiser, albeit weaker in some faculties, to gain better worlds like it in different spheres.

Smile and Wave Boys, Smile and Wave

This post is for all the people out there that don't get what they want. How many times a day do you wish you had something in your life, but it just isn't there? For me, it happens at least once a day, and about twice a week it is something really big that makes me depressed I don't have it. I know how old people with arthritis feel. I wake up every morning with a shooting pain down the left side of my lower body, every day hoping and praying that the pain will subside, stop, and eventually leave me forever. I feel moments, maybe minutes long worth, of freedom from the pain, but it inevitably comes back to literally bite me in the butt.
I guess pain is there to be my constant companion. She has already taught me a few things about life and now that I feel that the lessons are over, she can go. But she doesn't. She clings to me lint to cotton. We all have so much to learn from pain in our life, we just want to learn it and be done with it. Not so. That isn't the plan. I guess when I get older I will look back on my life and say, "sheesh, I am sooo glad that I went through that, I learned so much about life." Ha. But I am not older yet and I just say be gone.
Trust. Apparently trust comes with a price, and that price is some form of pain; whether it is physical or emotional, you have to pay the price. There is no skirting the contract, there is no hedging your bet. You have to pay what you have to pay and that is that.
I guess we can still feel pain in our life, but it does not have to bring us down. We can smile through it and endure. Yep. Smile and wave boys, smile and wave. That will be my motto: Smile and wave boys, smile and wave....

For love's Sake!

Returning home from working out, I had an extra skip in my step, yet at the same time a small chip on my shoulder. My leg hurt so I was ready to just get home and take some medicine--mmmmmm...on my way home I spotted a girl walking towards me on the same path. In the mood I was in I usually wouldn't care to notice anyone walking my way, but I noticed and she noticeably noticed me, then noticed me noticing her, so we mutually noticed each other. It was like I was in middle school again, seeing the cute girl walking towards me, instantaneously not knowing what to do and not wanting to look away because she is so dang cute! I glanced up, she glanced down, she glanced up, I glanced down. When we were about ten feet away from each other I managed a half-attractive smile and said "hey..." She grinned ear to ear and said, "Hi, how are you doing?" As I was about to respond, "great!" the tennis class beginners decided they did not want love to have a chance, one of their balls ricocheting off of a racquet right into the side of my head. As I yelped softly, the girl I was guffawing at put her hands up in a catching posture as if a tennis ball would bowl me over. She asked, "Are you o.k.," to which I responded, "Huh?! Oh yeah, I'm great, thanks, have a good one." I walked away as quickly as I could to hide the redness that invaded the rest of my face. I guess it just wasn't meant to be.

Are You Happy?

Yes!! No...wait, do you want me to answer that seriously or do you want me to give you you the socially perfunctory answer that everyone wants to hear because they don't really want to hear about your life because 99% of people 98% of the time only care and think about themselves? This was the beginning of a conversation I had with a dear friend last night, of which was returned the answer, 'of course I want the truth or I would not have asked.'

The truth is that, no, of course I am not happy. How many of us are happy in the truest sense of the word? I think very few of us are. I think very few of us let ourselves be happy and I think very many of us are stupid enough to keep our thoughts to ourselves and not find good advice and support from the people around us. My posts always end with some optimistic outlook on a bleak situation, exerting universal paradigms that we know happy people have themselves, hoping our paradigm will turn with time. The issue lies deeper than a change of mind, deeper than a universal truth, deeper than immediately accepting someone else's outlook on life to give life a pretense of fulfillment.

So many answers, I will not attempt to explicate our problems of unhappiness and find the cure-all for our problems in life. I might be a billionaire if I was able to do that. I think instead I will start from the bottom, from what I know: I know I am unhappy and I know I am unhappy because there are so many things that I desire to have in my life that are not in my life and I attribute the reason for those things not being there to my own laziness and fear. Good, now we are getting somewhere. We are seeing ourselves for what and who we are right now. Our problems lie in the times when all we see is what we could be, where we could be, and who we could be. I am going to see myself for who I am, accept myself as I am, and blog from there. I am just going to experiment in this step and try to be comfortable in the skin I live in now, not imaging myself being comfortable in a skin that I might eventually be in.