Need as Love - Food, Drink, Sleep

 I hear a lot of complaint about the need to keep eating food to sustain ourselves, to drink water to sustain ourselves, to need sleep to sustain ourselves.

I have not fully understood why we should complain so much about it, particularly those of us who can choose how, and when, to satisfy these needs. We can pick what we eat to some extent, and make the need be fulfilled in a way that pleases us (even if just a little). It seems like our ungratefulness that gets frustrated and impatient with the continued need to fulfill what our bodies need.

To me, it is a lovely thing that we should continue to need to do things. Of course it bothers me if I need to do something else (or tell myself I need to), and the need for food, drink, or sleep gets in the way of that. But that is a passing frustration that I easily realise is kind of silly. I also do enjoy to eat, so it's not so hard for me. It's odd to me that one wouldn't enjoy eating; what would be difficult to deal with is wanting to eat and not being able to.

In the need of my body, I get a sense of God's love- He made us need food, and we can sate it in a pleasurable way. Food can be good. It can also not be good, which is interesting in itself as I find out what I like and don't like, and then get to wonder why I don't like something.

Sleeping is good (as long as it works well enough) because of rest and peacefulness in that. It is nice to have seasons within a day where different things have to happen, and seasons within a year, when things are more slow, and then they move faster (as they might in more of an agrarian society).

Thirst is lovely to quench, if you can quench it. I actually love to feel thirsty as long as I can sate it because how it feels when I've drunk water after that is so, so good! I actually am frustrated in recent years that I don't usually feel actually thirsty, but just know I ought to drink because I can see the signs of slight dehydration (getting a bit tired and lethargic is one way I can sense it happening).

The other aspect of God's love in this is that He did give the means to fulfill these needs. The Fall, I believe, takes away our ability to sate these God-given needs. We are creatures that are made to enjoy a plethora of different sensations, both bodily and spiritual (by which I mean anything non-bodily, including intellectual 'gratification' as I'd call it). God gave the means by making us fit in this world in such a way that we can get answers, and we can get what we need, out of the created order. The created order affirms our neediness, and fulfills it, and that is God's love constantly giving over and over, as we are filled, get hungry again, eat again, and are content again.

The constant feeling over and over of contentment, of being re-satisfied, is very pleasant when one s not too cynical to appreciate it.

I am hoping I can learn to appreciate these things again, instead of living in a Scrooge-ish illusory world of hatefulness; believing that God is holding out on me.

Regretting Past Actions

The inability to look at my failures in the past, my foibles, and the silly, arrogant things I said and wrote, is an inability to see, and face, the sin within me, and my own shame. The inability to stare it in the face, and not be afraid if others see it, is only because of my own fear… as if I could withhold from God all the sins I’ve committed. If only I did not live in a delusion that I could actually hide.

It's not like one ever really can. To hide, all I did was I just hid from myself knowledge of all the silly things I've done, the things I can't stand; I turned my face away from seeing my own shame so I could believe it was not there. I just blinded myself to reality, refused to see my impact on the world, because it was all making me feel so ashamed.

So I put myself in an enchantment.

Is There a Point?

Will all things fall to pieces in my hands, all things I touch turn to dust? It seems that everything I touch becomes a tormented nightmare. I cannot live but that things turn into sawdust in my mouth; as I taste, all things become death. The life, the liveliness, it is vain. All is vain. Mere breath, vanity. It is nothing but sorrow, nothing but cheating fancy. Carrots dangled before you, never being reached. Life is a lie, an illusion, a taunting temptation.

It's hard to put something here for you all that sounds so dismal, but I have realised if I don't let out what I'm facing inside, there's no likelihood I can break the spell. I have a fog over me, and part of this blog is to try to dispel it by making myself say truths. But to say good truths, one seems to have to own the bad 'truths' one is believing.

Every one of us believes a great many things that aren't true, that mess up our whole lives. The impact of what you believe on how you live your life is immense. I believe what we do comes directly out of what we think. So therefore, we must work to change what we think about the world.

But you can only change something if you know it is there. Sometimes it is too hard to face what one believes alone- sometimes it is so dark, you can't do it without going to the worst possible place (imagine, if you dare).

We have to drive ourselves to face what we are really thinking, and take ownership of what we believe. Then we get to decide: do I want to keep believing this, even as it tears my life into pieces, and turns all sanity in the world into chaos before my eyes? Do I want to believe things that only crush me into despair, and turn the world around into a grey monotony?

That is another choice: as someone whose mind tends to head towards seeing the world as a sort of depressed cause-and-effect machine, am I going to believe that that is all there is to the world, or am I going to listen to the part of me that says, in a very small, squeaking voice, that since that kills all motivation to live, maybe there is something actually logical in believing in Meaning and Purpose?

Am I going to open myself up to the possibility that good is ultimate over badness? I get to choose this.

But still, I am stuck in the haze of not being willing to hope. It's too scary to open myself to being disillusioned again. I don't know if I could stand it one more time in my life.

Because I struggle with this, I have had to think about a lot of the things I've written on this blog. It has been a sort of mammoth effort to keep myself afloat by forcing myself to think about the logic of reality and to force myself to see the good in things, and to force myself to justify it logically as far as possible so that I cannot deny it is there. But I think I may have left my feelings behind, and I'm not sure where I left them, and how to pick them up again. But we'll see...

Learning from Stories

I wrote this once for another blog, and now I'll share it here, without editing (maybe someday I will edit it), because otherwise I won't be likely to post it.

 

When looking back at my childhood, many things seem odd about it. One thing that is perhaps odd, but definitely interesting to me, is how I learned what I know. It is very likely that I do not really know the whole case at all, but I will attempt to speak about one aspect of it at least.

One thing my siblings and I benefited from was being read to a great deal by our mother, and occasionally our father. We would all load up on or around my mother’s recliner armchair, and try to see the books ourselves (selfish imps). She collected (not sure how, actually) books that she felt were good literature, with nice illustrations. Older books, perhaps, in general, but some might have been quite new, too. I do not know for sure.

I must have taken these stories seriously, but not that I imagined them to be part of life; I never seemed to really do that. Instead, I took very seriously the elements implied in them, and seemed to subconsciously divide truth from the fantastical. Probably, it seems to me now, very intensely. It is very hard to articulate what I was doing, and how it was; I do have a grasp of this in my head, but it is hard to grasp at, like one talks of clouds being. I learned a great deal from this, nonetheless.

As I wander around life now, I find out more and more things that I must have learned from those books, and from books read later in my life. But the earliest books we read were perhaps the most informative, being read to me in the time when I was more capable of ‘forming impressions’. It seems that the more rational you get, the more things cover up the absorbing of new things, as, perhaps, you spend time consciously bothering your head about previously absorbed information.

I feel that in hearing those books, I formed a clearer idea of how the world works in a big-picture way; the sort of patterns the world holds, and thus what sort of things make sense, and what don’t, so I can distinguish between logical  and illogical more quickly.

People do put a lot of import on stories for forming, and I believe it is probably partly due to seeing many different parts of the world in a way that takes you in, so you care about it. I do not think we necessarily read a great variety of stories, but for whatever reason, it was instrumental in giving me a concept of how varied the world really is, to the point that I am not easily surprised by things now.

The climax of this story-learning was when I read The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven. It seems that then, as had never happened before, the Picture fell into place simply and profoundly, and I could see the world properly for the first time. Somehow, in the conscious bit of my brain, things didn’t make much sense to me previous to my eleventh year, and when I read The Lord of the Rings, that more unconscious bit of me finally pushed its leaves out of the dirt and came to the light of the sun. It was as if the framework necessary for knowledge itself was finally put into place.

And I insist that this is in no wishy-washy, fantastical way, as I am not exactly a fairy-tale person. But you can believe me or you can not.

 

As a parting note, I believe it matters what sort of stories one is reading, that they be good stories. That will be for another time, if ever, but I do not believe all such things are equal, except if you wish to simply be informed of the wisdoms and stupidities of human beings as a study, and you don't intend to necessarily become wiser at the same time. 

Do We Deserve Anything?

(I’m aware the following could seem a rather confusing, twisting-and-turning exploration of this topic, but hopefully it makes sense. I may read it someday later and find out how insane it is, but I’m in The Thick of Things right now so I can’t quite tell if it’s sane.)

People often throw around phrases like: ‘you deserve it!’ to encourage other people. It’s always hit me as very hollow; it doesn’t have truth backing it up. I know I do not deserve anything, or, at least, in my deeply cynical state I certainly cannot believe it.

I have for years let myself act as if maybe I’m wrong that I don’t deserve anything, but I can never shake that looking at the world that way always seems to be the right way, the way that rings true with everything.

No: I don’t deserve anything. Nobody, especially not God, is obliged to give me anything, to do me any good. I can feel very deeply that I have done wrong, and that every thought in my mind is bent in the wrong way: every single thing that gets inside my skull becomes perverted by my way of thinking about it.

Perhaps this is shame-speak, and it is not wholly true, depending on how you reason it out, but it is also definitely the idea.

It especially scares me when Christians who acknowledge human sinfulness talk as if anyone deserves something. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t yet fully internalised that Christ died for our sins, thus making us deserving… and that is how I am sure I will come to see it when I get out of the Dark Woods of Doubt.

But the stage of feeling one’s complete unworthiness is actually one of the stages of coming to God, to repentance. No person can possibly admit their sin and thus allow God and Christ to make them New again if they do not… actually have sin that makes them totally unworthy of God’s giving them good things.

The penitent sinner feels so frustrated, so lost in the extent of their complete depravity that they are forced to go to God, even against their own wills… even against what they want to do, because of the shame of being naked before God, of being seen as ugly, repulsive, and so-to-speak belching-out-uncleanness.

I am lost as long as I have any part of myself that still imagines it can make me good. Any part of myself that imagines it’s in my own power to follow The Law (as Paul talks about in Romans) causes my own undoing because I can never actually do everything right. I will always slip up, forget things, mess up here or there. If I am my own god, then I will always fail (at least considering the kind of person I am and how I think I ought to behave).

Until I get so to the end of myself that I am sick of being In Control of every aspect of my life, so exhausted by trying to keep up appearances and to do everything The Best Way One Can, I will never be able to be free from the overpowering sense of undeserving… I will only continue trudgingly attempting to deserve by doing things as well as I can.

Everything I do, then, is done with this aura of having to do it right because it is my way of earning what I want in life, earning God’s grace to me, because unless I do the right things I couldn’t possibly deserve help.
The point of this is just that I don’t have any part of me that can possibly believe I could deserve things; I can’t reason with myself to show myself that’s an actual possibility. I hope to talk about this more in the future; I’ve been wrestling with this idea since I was a child, so I have a lot of different angles I’ve wondered about, and different logickings I’ve thought through.

Essentially the years of thinking about it brought me to think: alright then. I don’t deserve anything. It’s pointless to worry about deserving things… and the only thing that seems to have any point is to feel how undeserving I am so I stop essentially living like a Pharisee, trying to earn my salvation; so that, essentially, I am completely morally undone and have no other choice but to give every bit of control up to God.

The Heart Wherein to Forgive is Joy

'...if ever I offended against you in any matter great or small, forgive me now.'

'Dear King,' said the Unicorn, 'I could almost wish you had, so that I might forgive it.' 

~ The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis

This is the gift that C.S. Lewis gives us. Showing us the joyful heart that wishes to do virtue, to have every opportunity to show love that it can be given. Where sin's existence causes no fear, because where there is sin and evil, that person knows Grace and Forgiveness may and will abound more.

We should not fear sin and evil because God has made a way that all can be made right. And God wishes deeply that in every case of our sin, His grace may be shown to be greater. Our thoughtless sin, done out of forgetfulness, should not impede our trust in God, because God is much greater than sin and evil. He wishes to show us His bounty in the face of darkness. He wishes us to have faith. Our own faithlessness is what will impede us; never God being unwilling to bestow gifts.

Whenever I have found myself to rest peacefully, believing God, then I begin to see graces hither and thither all around me. It is either as if all the good things that were become bright like stars, or else it is that more good is happening. It is impossible for me to know which- it might as well be one and the same.

In a heart of faith, opportunities are made visible. They might have been there before, but when we have faith, 'eyes to see,' we actually see them, and can catch them in our hands. Every little tiny blessing is an opportunity to praise God, and every moment of praising God is a grace to us. It lightens our hearts, it softens our hearts so that we are more malleable to the good around us, it braces us against the oncoming tide of darkness, and it becomes a shield and armour against the onslaught of life.

But instead of a heavy shield and armour, it is light, it makes our feet skip and dance, it makes us like a ninja. As the Bible says, sin is a weight... darkness in our hearts weighs us down. To be filled with God is to be filled with light and with lightness, with weightlessness, but interestingly (I dare say) a weighty weightlessness. A real weightlessness. Not vanity.

In the joyful, forgiving heart of faith, a person is able to rise above the trees and see the picture of life from above, and he is no longer afraid of what he sees. While he is weighted down, 'within' the world (in and of it, instead of in and not of it), he cannot see the path ahead, and that the story of life is a wielding of blows between good and evil, with good always having the upper hand.

I'm reminded of something I heard continuously through my life (perhaps it is from the picture in The Lion, the With and the Wardrobe of Aslan and the Stone Table), that death cannot hold Him. God is so great that no bands of evil could ever withstand Him.

(In saying that we should not fear sin, I mean also that the sorrow and grief sin evokes in us should also not be a tether: to be sorrowful is right, and it frees us to forgive others, and to submit ourselves to the forgiveness of others. It is freedom to feel even the pain of sin. All correct reactions to things are freeing.)

Not Trusting

I realise I spend so much of my life controlling. I try to know what's going on, why things are happening, so that I can control how things unfold, even when I am not directly involved. It's like being a hawk, watching the world, wanting to steer things, but not able to. I am not involved. I can watch from afar and feel very much involved in what is going on; my own distance from a problem means nothing if I understand the problem.

This is such a drain. I put such a strain and pressure on myself to be correct, not to say anything I can't back up (at least in my own head). It doesn't serve any purpose because I can never be one hundred percent sure. It merely exhausts me.

This need for certainty is usually brought on by what may happen in the future, hence why I bring it up. I write out of a drained feeling- a feeling of hopelessness, because I can't seem to break myself from this notion that I do not deserve a good future, so I have to work hard to earn it from God. I have to think the right thoughts, do the right things, never make a mistake. I feel as if, if I have not gotten what I want now, I must not be allowed to have it (which then distances me from God- why ask for anything?).

I have been reading The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. In the chapter on The Wisdom of God, it says, near the end, 'Trust me, be not afraid.' The idea is: God knows just what ought to happen, and He knows just how it should happen. He leads the blind on in the way they should go; they never knowing where, and perhaps feeling reticent, but always it leads to the right place.

This is what I was leaning into as a young teenager, but let go of as I began to be more exposed to adults. I always imagine that we have a very strong culture nowadays that leans away from merely trusting ourselves to God to take us on the path we must take. It is not necessarily true that this is our culture; it might just be that I am seeing it around me more than other messages because I am discouraged myself.

At any rate- I have felt that I must choose to turn away from listening to and minding the culture I find myself in now. I do not feel at all a part of it- I am an alien, but I am not yet believing I am also a free alien, free to do what I think is right. I am not standing on my own two feet, standing in God, which is the only place I could stand; the only place where what I desire most, and believe is true, exists. I have felt lost my whole life, when I try to stick myself in other people's shoes and understand their thinking, because the 'thinking' I have seen there has never seemed rich enough, robust enough, to encompass all of reality that has to be explained.

(I also likely try to put myself only in the shoes of people with whom I disagree, which means my brain has this notion that I am in opposition to everyone, but that's merely because I never really Register people who agree with me.)

At any rate! This was a conglomeration of confusion. When I am in this mental state, I am only confusion.

About Comment Notifications

I haven't been receiving emails about approving people's comments- I'm very sorry about that. I'll keep an eye on it from now on! I would have approved them if I'd known, but I haven't been writing posts (as you can tell) for awhile now, so my eye hasn't been on this ball.

Thank you all for reading my posts, and for your comments! I really, really appreciate it.

Technical Difficulties

So, apparently Blogger refuses to let me get text in a post to be the way I ask it to in editing. So, for whatever reason, until it will just magically work, some posts might look a bit wonky font-size-wise, perhaps otherwise, too.

I've had difficulties like this with Blogger in past posts and the only thing I could do was keep editing and wish it would 'stick' eventually. It's preposterous. So we'll see.

Edit: So far I got it to work (by selecting each paragraph separately and changing it! What on earth, Blogger?). I get really towards not wanting to write blogs when the platform creates issues like this- I had issues with Wordpress before, and gave up on it, and now Blogger.

Consider this post a warning that this will probably happen again and posts could, for no reason I know of, look out of the usual format.

Life is a Dance

Ordinary life is a dance, work itself is a dance… it is a dance with time, a dance with need, staring poverty in the face and choosing to fight that possible future, to create instead a bountiful (or bountiful enough) future.

It is no life to live not realising that catastrophe is possible, that the safety and comfort of the present could suddenly turn to naught. It is no life to act as if pain and death do not exist. It is an empty life, a fearful life, because we deep down do know we could not get what we want… we can’t face that fact. We can’t face that reality is full of futures we might not wish to have. We want to hide with our heads in the sand, face away from the window of our room, just so as to avoid the ‘dark futures.’ We cannot look in the face of the pain and loss others we know face, or the pain and loss evident in history and in other places far away.

And when we fear pain and loss, we are the worst comforters to those who go through it. And then when we go through it, we know that since we didn’t wish to go deep into another person’s darkness and grief, nobody else will do that for us! It is what in our minds we think is normal- avoiding the pain and facing hard reality is normal to us, so we cannot grieve. We think we have to pull ourselves up from it, and that inevitably includes ignoring it, I have found.

It does not mean you can’t tilt your hat at its existence, say words that acknowledge that pain was there, but you can’t face it. You can say, detaching your heart from your words, that you’re sad that someone died. But if you were to look at it, you’d see that it opens up a whole train of thought that alludes to the fragility of life, which we hate to face. We wish to extend life, and because we are so hell bent on that, we cannot stare life in the face- part of knowing about life is knowing about death. You don’t know life unless you know that it could-have-not-been.

You can’t fully live if you do not face that life is that dance at the edge of death. Life could so easily be put out, like a bit of breeze puts a candle out all of a sudden. Life is as fragile as a candle’s light, as fragile as a crystal glass or a bit of expensive china. But also it is akin as precious, comparatively, as those things- we wish our lives, and the lives of those around us, to continue just as fervently, or rather much more fervently, as we wish for our precious crystal and china to last. We take care with our lives as we take care with a fragile object.

We should not be afraid to see that. It does no good to turn away from that fact, that any random accident could happen. It is all in the air around us to fear this fact, so we are addicted to safety, to finding all ways we can to prevent calamity, to prevent that little wind from coming and puffing out our candle of life, puffing out our fragile civilisation.

What if we stopped fearing this? How could it be better for us?

Joyful Self-Discipline

I have a tendency to turn my self-discipline into a sort of hard pushiness. I too easily want to tell myself I am doing things 'wrong.'

I effectively (emotionally) forget that self-discipline is a glorious, wonderful, freeing thing. If you can, in fact, make yourself do what you know you ought to do, what you know you long-term would like yourself to do, it is incredibly nice. Or so I found. I would call it a kind of Narnian self-discipline. A joyous discipline that knows that every step you take now will lead to great fruit later- a hopeful outlook.

I am very numb these days, so it's hard to remember this. I am very hopeless, downtrod. I used to take great, great pleasure in seeing myself improve- seeing myself become wiser and stronger, and also more happy. To be capable, to be able, to be able to feel all the ups and downs without the downs SMITING you, is wonderful. To know there is a future, and that it is not all in your control- that you can let go that tight monster-grip on the future.

This, of course, only works for me because I believe that God ultimately has the reins, even though I don't feel as if I believe that right now. One goes emotionally through ups and downs. So I can lean into this, and lean into the beauty of self-discipline- it is a part of sanctification, and sanctification is the most beautiful thing that can happen to me!

The hard work of self-discipline goes through also the path of being able to accept our weakness, which is probably what is hardest for me to accept (perhaps would be for anyone?). We all have different forms of weakness. For me at least right now, I am seeing that I want to be able to do whatever I 'should be able to,' which is also what I want, because I love to be capable long-term. But I have lost sight of the love and gone solely at this as 'I NEED TO BE CAPABLE,' thus losing sight of what would motivate me to be capable in the first place! I thrive on motivation, I thrive on intense enjoyment of reality, and without it, when I am numb, I am hopeless and desperate.

This is morphing into talking about the love aspect: my goal needs to be the love of 'what is right,' because that actually helps me, rather than the 'need to be capable,' which is rather utilitarian and devoid of meaning. I can ignite it with meaning, and then immediately I go back to an infatuation with the beauty of Humans As Creative Beings.

So I just get back to where I started years ago, and that's good. But- to feel it! How to feel it?

Dietrich von Hildebrand on Beauty in Light of Redemption

My dear Madame W. shared this chapter, 'Beauty in the Light of the Redemption,' which relates to previous posts about beauty, completion, perfection.

It was a wonderful post which I will still be mulling over- it is hard for me to accept that this Highest Beauty can be a real, true thing that I am allowed not to shun. I have been damning it in my mind for a long time because I have most strongly desired it. I felt as a child that beauty could not be God, but I also knew that I was 'overthinking things.' It is an odd situation. I told myself that what I wanted could not be what was.

I was playing a kind of self-hatred game with myself my whole life, trying to bereave myself of everything that made life worth living, as if that makes one righteous.

I know that if I opened myself to believing Beauty to really be Good, I would have to deal with my tendency to make Beauty and other un-primary things primary. I probably am doing it subconsciously even as I am 'damning' it within myself.

If I am indeed damning it within myself, and it is truly 'of God,' then that would mean I am sinning in that respect. I'm not afraid of this: it is actually a relief to realise it might be wrong, but I am 'damning' Beauty because I imagine it to be for some higher good that I am damning it, but I think it is going about things the wrong way. The way to put Beauty in its actual place is to seek first the Kingdom of God. Then 'all these things' will be added unto me. God created this world and all that He intended is meant to be. He did not create an accident that is to be 'put away' when some process is done with. The world is part of the end. The goal, the telos. We are creaturely things, the world our setting.

I immediately think: then I must fight with myself, make myself see Beauty as good! But again, this is looking at this wrong. I look at everything as a fight, as me having to punch myself around till things fall into their proper place. I need to stop it. Stop looking at myself as something to be pushed around and forced into its place. To be sorted, to be dealt with. It is very, very hard to shed this... and at this very moment, I am in a bit of a rut and can't for the life of me see how I would begin to relax into not damning Beauty.

Procrastination and Emotions

Apparently some people are thinking that procrastination is not about time management, or life management and planning in general, but is instead a matter of emotions. Here is an article for your pleasure.

It makes sense to me, as I have long struggled with certain elements of procrastination (who doesn't, these days?). I tend to think we are in an age of procrastination; everyone doing it in their own way. It is not good. The prevalence of all sorts of excuses not to do obvious everyday duties, excuses not to do things that will toughen you up, worries me.

And it is about emotions. We have to learn to buoy ourselves up so that we can lionheartedly deal with the things life is made of. We should not shirk them, or fear them. We should not imagine we need something to assuage our unmotivated gloom. A lot of the people I know seem to live to some degree on the Scale of Acedia. These days many of us suffer from not having any reason to live, and we also don't seem to realise that we will at some point suffer from feeling there is no point to live. If we knew that we would feel that way, and that it ultimately means nothing to whether life has a point at all or not, then we might be a lot better off.

But without that knowledge, we are not armed against the impending dark raincloud of pointlessness. We are incredibly susceptible to stories of doomful happenings and despair-inducing realities. This inadvertently heads into the territory of 'what to do about suffering,' but that's not the point here.

Ultimately, though, we'll have to deal with life often seeming a hopeless, pointless thing. The question we will have to answer is whether it even matters. If you constantly live worrying about whether life is hopeless or not, you'll probably never get to the actual meat of living, and therefore you'll be cut off from ever feeling like there's a point to living.

Sadly, this is exactly one of those things in life where, if you want something, you're going to have to act as if you had it so that you can get it. To feel motivated, you're going to have to just do it anyway and then when you produce results, and feel all exhausted (but happily so) at the end of the day, you'll be all happy to sit on your front porch with your feet on chair puffing your evening smokerings (or better, if you're actually a wizard, Harry). You'll possibly sometimes feel rip-roaring for the next day to come so that you can become even more happily productive.

To overcome procrastination, you have to act as if you didn't procrastinate. It is the only way.

Weakness and Strength

Over the years starting in childhood, I tried to defy my own desire for things that lighten my mood. I tried to become strong by not needing anything to lighten me up, to lighten the gloom and greyness of life. But now I'm just really crusty and irritated and want to die.

I'm not so sure it worked so well.

I went too far. There is a joyous spot in between extremes, I think. A joyous spot of realising you're weak and sinful and need help and not imagining you can do it all yourself. Not imagining that strength means being solitary, that needing a helping hand is weakness.

Now I cannot accept help or crutches (except the many crutches I naturally cling to after all that I've forced myself to deny). I cling to things to support me in the darkness, alone, unwilling to admit what I have done to myself, unwilling to admit that even as I try to be strong, I am weak under the surface, clinging to addictions that one can always find and hide in the secret darkness.

I am telling myself, so that I can keep myself out of the darkest depths, that I have managed it! I am strong, I have defied death! But I am losing my mind and falling into complete insanity. I can't think clearly, I can't see beautiful things, I won't let myself see beautiful things because if I dared see them, I might start needing them to lighten my mood! I can't possibly let myself even have the possibility of lightening my mood.

Then I would be at risk of falling off the skyscraper of hope and joy and crash back into the abyss of horrifying nothingness! If I dared let myself think there really is anything there in this world, that this world even exists, that Beauty exists, I would be terribly at risk of experiencing a crushing blow to the head that I could never recover from.

Right?

Of course, this is no way to live. I have to choose: do I live, or do I die? And living means opening myself to beauty, and opening myself to the scary possibilities of being crushed, of being teased, of being found to be ignorant and stupid, of not getting to do what I would like to do, all those things.

I have to let it all come flooding upon me, gripping me with an iron grip. At first it will be hard, having lived so long in a state of Stoic Doldrums. The real difficulty comes from what I most fear, which I won't talk about right now. It is not fear of feeling things, but fear of things far beyond that. If only it were just feelings- I rather like that idea.

Thinking Oneself to Death

I have been trying to transcend perspective, to question myself to such an extent that nothing I think goes unthought-about. Always checking what I assume, always questioning myself. But it is exhausting. You can’t keep questioning your own perception. You have to accept that you merely perceive and build that up over time- experience, simple experience. It wastes ever so much time to worry about ‘why you thought that’ and whether it came up because of some previous bias (in the hopes that in the future you can never be accused of 'bias').

Everything probably does arise due to ‘bias’, but all bias is, when it really comes down to it, is that we are not God, not able to see everything happening everywhere, and therefore don’t know what we’re really looking at. If one insists on being aware of the bias, one can only settle back and be patient to wait till new information comes in to illuminate previous information and give it its context.

But it is all a waste of one’s mind to worry about it at all. And the person who worries about it is in danger of being cocky that he knows better than everyone else because he at least is willing to question himself (even to the point of questioning his own existence!). I have just the exact same kind of hubris that many recent philosophers may have had (here I question my assumption that they had it).

I have been exhausting myself. When I read a book, I don’t merely listen to it from my perspective; I think about what others would think of what I am thinking of it, and I think about where the author came from in saying what he’s saying, and think about what people who disagree with him might say to him and I get mentally to the exhausting point of thinking, what’s the point of thinking at all if all thinking is the result of … previous thinking? Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear.

Everything we think is contingent. I’m having to argue with myself that that is fine. But I should stop arguing with myself and be a simple peasant instead; back off out of this silly elitist tomfoolery of thinking I could possibly ever be truly objective. Who can? Nobody. No amount of self-questioning will work. And if you ever dare try to know all the knowledge in the world, your brain might just explode as in the Indiana Jones movie, The Crystal Skull, or you will at least go mildly insane (like I have) and wish you were dead.

I must meditate on what it would be to be a simple peasant. I have to stop this intellectualist nonsense. It is far better to go outside and wonder silly things about why that thing is there; did a squirrel pop by? Then move on to ‘I feel like a cup of tea!’ and ‘I feel like reading that essay by Lewis again where he talks about questioning ourselves to death…’ (Lewis probably wrote many such essays. Other people likely have, too. We’re all stuck inside a dystopian nightmare of self-important thinking!)

Things Made Well

Growing up in an oddball homeschooled family, I have a great love of well-made objects. I enjoyed seeing anything made really well out of leather, wood, whatever it might be. I got into historical sewing because I saw that I could perhaps make things well. I would not have been interested for the sake of costuming- I don't want it merely to look right, I want it to be the actual thing itself.

It is a little like Plato's ideals. I have always cared enormously about the actual thingness of a thing. The idea of it, the spirit of it, what it actually is, which is wrapped up in all of how to use it well, what it is really for, everything. And the variety of Things, and the variety of Things within a category of thing, is what makes life so very lovely. I got passionate about it when I was a living, breathing teenager, but since then my emotions have dulled.

There is nothing better than seeing a shoe (to get an example) that is made so well it isn't likely to fall apart unless you use it as it isn't intended to be used. Something made within an inch of its own death, made so well it will last, made of materials that won't go 'out of fashion', made in a style that won't go out of fashion, and so on. Something that lasts, that is useful, and is also beautifully made. Smooth, warm brown oiled leather, thick waxed linen thread, carved, shapely wooden heel (perhaps bound in leather)...

The characteristic I desire in everything I do is well-made-ness. The goal is always to head towards the beauty of perfection. We are here as stewards of this world to seek the best that we can do with all things. When we destroy, we create from it something new, something beautiful. Out of the ashes the phoenix is born. Out of our own darkness a great beauty is created; the birth of wisdom and experience. The well-made-ness is in every part of life. I seek it in every action I can do (when I am not being taken over in the style of The Screwtape Letters). And I must surrender myself to God's making me perfect... must surrender the control of keeping myself just the way I am, keeping myself in comfort and entertainment, in ease.

We only have freedom when we are completely, fully able to partake of creating out of the materials of this world (and ourselves; we are also stewards of ourselves). When we acknowledge we are stewards of this world in the way God made it and intended it to be, the ability to make things intensely beautiful is opened to us. We must look on the world as it is. This world is not cheap, not hastily thrown together. This world is a masterpiece (though broken and not as it should be now), and what we make in it ought to be a masterpiece as well.

It is hard for me to bear living now, when things are made so cheaply and to make things cheaply is not particularly minded. I have very high standards, and I'm not about to relax them. It is a good challenge to have on my head that I must try to do everything extremely well, and besides, I won't do it all well because I am an incredibly lazy person at heart. I really enjoy the strength of the challenge hanging over me, the sense that it gives me that I am really not all I crack myself up to be (because I am constantly cutting corners). It gives you a healthy sense of your own position in reality when you are not always managing what you intend to manage.

Thrill of Hope

If you sit in and picture the depravity of the Fall, the Thrill of Hope is possible. Our lives are good enough, comfortable enough, there are enough solutions to avoid the pain of the Fall for many of us here in the West, so we are immune to God's gift.

We avoid knowing about how broken things are, how painful things are- there has to be some solution, a comfort or an entertainment to numb our feelings, to numb our awareness to the brokenness of things.

We perhaps would like to live in a thrill, but we are never willing to get there through the right means. You can only get there through pain and sacrifice, the greatest pain of seeing we are unlovable, the greatest sacrifice of seeing we deserve nothing the way we are now. The pursuit of thrill, the pursuit of happiness, is all done with the humming sensation of 'I deserve it.' People even say that.

When I was a child, it might have been shocking to me that it would become so entirely normal to tell people and ourselves that 'we deserve a good life.' It is so painfully clear to me that I do not. How can people not see the darkness in themselves? To me the darkness in people is painfully obvious all the time. We are not good, and we never will be if we keep pretending we are- that is the worst fault!

First we die in our hearts, we die to our own ego, we die to any delusions of our own perfection and deserving, knowing we are base and ugly, broken beyond repair. Then, like the glimmer of spring creeping into Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it is possible to take in that Someone saves us from that darkness within ourselves; that we need not be Good. Someone is good for us.

A possibility for relief, a great sigh out, falling down out of the exhaustion of pretending you are something, falling into the soft, consoling arms of a Father, falling into the relief that we do not control or run reality... that Someone Else can run it far better than we can. We are mere creatures. The whole of the world is not our purview. We only are our purview, we and the little daily things we touch, the people we know.

Little stones that start an avalanche.

Love For No Reason

God's perfect love is a love that does not love us because of our characteristics, our credentials. He did not choose to love us after we became a worthwhile object; after we achieved some milestone in life. God does not love us because we can speak and communicate with Him, God does not love us because we crack a good joke. God loved while He thought of an idea of a person that was you, and then and there you were.

God chooses to love us, for no reason of our own making, for no status or identity we have, seemingly randomly, for no reason. Except that we are made by Him, as we are ‘made’ by our parents; the love and affection of that ‘unchosen’ relationship, and in God’s case that He is responsible for the very idea of ourselves- for inventing in His mind our character. There is no choice of anyone except the lover: God chose our character, chose our quirks, and thus He made us. His Perfect Thought invented us.

So no man may boast; no one of us is greater than another; (we are worthy for the same reason, we are special, for we are God’s creatures) no more worthy of God’s love for any reason imaginable except that we are God’s creation, His humans, creatures.

We may not make God love us any more than He already does because the righteousness of Christ is the perfection by which we could even love, and it is placed on us, like a film, a lens, if a lens could instead be applied to the object seen.

One cannot be more accepted than we already are- there is no more deserving we can achieve. It is simply not there.

No one truly deserves particular, special love (in the sense of a higher degree of love than other people deserve). We merely are taken with someone, and allow ourselves subconsciously to love the object.

Affection happens without our choosing, accidentally. In a sense, we should not confuse our affection with the object’s deserving.

Because in love we were conceived (in God's passionate interest in thinking out, for His pleasure, a person like each of us), we cannot earn love from God. He came up with the complete and perfect understanding of us when He thought of us. He knew us completely, because He made that Complete Self in all its facets, in all its quirks. You can do nothing to deserve more love than that Idea deserved when He thought of it.

And He loves the idea of you. He loves to think about the characteristics of you. You are interesting to Him, you are beautiful to Him like a wonderfully harmonised symphony. Your parts move in coordination, in a complex dance together; the parts balance each other, the facets play together like beautiful lights shining through a stained glass. You can be no more glorious than He pictured you when He first conceived the idea of you: He knew all your glory right then and there. And He let it out to play in this world. He wants to see you bounce off of reality, bounce off of others, because He thinks you will add a lovely element, shade, flavour to all the interactions you have with things and people.

You Want Control? Here is Fear.

I have been in denial that I am a creature of fear. I have tried to cope with the complex problems I invented by denying that I am afraid. I am even afraid to be afraid; I imagine that being afraid will trap me, which is true. But I feared to share my fear- I feared to seem weak. I do very much wish to seem strong. It is easy for me to keep that illusion when my life is much the same, from day to day, week to week, year to year. So safe from any crazy curve balls that could be thrown at me. And always I am looking at others to learn what curve balls may come my way, always seeing what I could come into contact with and mentally acquainting myself with those things so they cannot overwhelm me.

I will not drown. I will not be trapped. I can do this; I can do anything.

When I am most depressed, it's due to fear - the future is closed, I feel stuck. Trapped. All my limbs bound, things pressing in on me, stifling the air, suffocating me. The choices I wish to take are mere illusion... the future is dead; it can only ever go downhill. All that is darkest is most real. The only future I can see is one of problems here, and problems there, and that future is a stifling, dead, joyless, empty, dystopian thing.

I live constantly gearing up, alert, on the edge of my seat, eyes wide open, my mind fighting for certain outcomes, even in my dreams. I learn from others' experiences so I might have 'the best future,' never, it seems, merely for the fun of learning about others. Do I really care about other people? I highly doubt it, except in those blissful moments when God seems to have reached through me and is using my body and mind and heart to do His will in others' lives.

I know what hell I have made for myself, but if every single area of life is an area where things are not happening 'as they ought to,' it is hard, ever so hard, not to exert control over that part of your life. So hard not to wrap your mind around that thing and make yourself acquainted with the ins and outs of it, as your mind sees it, and make yourself bear the thing. Iron grip. Grasping, grasping, squeezing the thing to death- 'I will not let you do what I do not want; if you insist on doing it, I will make myself used to you. I will not be denied.'

I live in fear because I imagine I can control. It is not a free life. It is not what God would intend for any of us. He wishes us to be free of care because we trust in Him... I am clearly in no way trusting in Him. It seems that even by understanding this situation of control and fear, I am yet again controlling, and yet again afraid. I fear my own case of control because I also know what that will cause, so I wish to control it and prevent future control...

...by CONTROLLING.

God's Glory Frightens Us

Is our fear of God about His glory? 

Are we terrified of the expansiveness and greatness of His glory, His beauty? Are we terrified of encountering the True One, the only Person who is Perfect and True, the only One with integrity, the only One who is consistent, the only One who cannot lie, and to Whom all lies are the greatest affront? Are we terrified of seeing our depravity thrown naked by seeing the perfectness of Him? The contrast between Him and our state would humble us. 

We do not like really to be told we are wrong. It’s a little easier to bear being shown wrong by imperfect humans; there we have the gratification of knowing that they’re not all they’re cracked up to be, either- in them we see ourselves, which is perhaps one reason why when they show themselves better than we ourselves, we are resentful of it, and angry at ourselves- they shouldn’t be any better than we are. 

But when we are faced with the Perfect, we have no escape in judging that One, except in a rebellious, temperamental fit.

My Fight with Complexity

I have had a bit of a journey to deal with complexity for various reasons. I realised this example can serve as an introduction into how I look at life, how I navigate it. A big piece is self-control- I had to learn it or I was not going to be able to have what I wanted at all out of life. The question that was basically posed to me as a child was- do you want Life or do you want to be miserable in the future? The only way not to be miserable was self-control and self-denial. Meekness, which I wrote about earlier, relates to this, and why I posted that was because of how passionate I am about godly self-discipline.

I have found over time from others and myself that I can be rather vague in communication. Perhaps part of it was my automatic assumption that things are quite basic; that all in life boils down to simple things. It became evident in childhood that I had the tendency to leave out important information when I was figuring out how to do daily tasks best. Because I was made fun of for it, I made myself figure out how to deal with the complexity of life (also important when your family is intellectually-inclined and you want to be In On It). If I figured out how to manage the complexity, I would be able to explain myself better- I found I was often missing the mark in explaining myself. My ideas don't go away if other people disagree, unless they managed to disprove it.

So I realised, by the word of wise people and vicarious experience, that it's safest to view complexity as reality and to face it if you want to live with ease, be happy in the long run, and all that jazz. The road to simplicity has to go through complexity; a little syrup boils down from a lot of sap. 

I thought then, if I enter into and live in the metaphorical hurricane of so-much-conflicting-information, maybe one day it will feel like my feet are on solid ground- I will get used to the chaos. Picturing it somewhat like this was how I reconciled myself to putting myself through all the rigmarole I still do put myself through. I forced myself to 'enter the hurricane' as a child, putting one leaden foot in front of the other, and gained habit, momentum. I am fascinated by mind-numbing hard-core self-work since I think it is the only way to live better, wiser- it is the way to pave the future that I want.

I was not allowed to get away with any simplistic notions as a child. I want to hate that, but it's not worth hating reality (I know from what many wise people said, it doesn't make things easier). I decided quite young that I was going to, even if it was the last thing I did, love how things actually are, however hard it is. I just decided. I will keep asking if I am facing things, I will keep reassessing. The hardest things to do are also the most rewarding, even emotionally. I had some moments as a teenager of incredible euphoria, seeing how it all was working out, like a vision. Most of life is a drudge, full of impatience, but the only way to be truly happy is to do what has to be done, and eventually you become used to it, and it becomes life-giving.

To Ask for Help

I have found out gradually over the years that, though I very much want help, I will not ask for it.

I try to understand a problem first. I feel as if I should know first what is the whole of the problem and what is the solution before I go and ask for help- then I can articulate what I specifically need (I tell myself). But I never end up actually asking, and I know that when I do, I am bargaining and trying to make the other person give it to me. When you have spent days, months or even years thinking about a problem before you ask someone, there's going to be a lot of baggage built up on it and it will sound like a demand, however sweetly you frame it.

One thing I will have to work on is learning to ask God for things without determining beforehand all the answers. If I determine beforehand, I may never ask. Besides, I can feel like I never reach a conclusion (O woe!), always aware that there is something more I don't yet understand, something hiding just out of sight that I can sense.

It is very hard to ask anybody what I want before I know that I need it- it is a great concession. It is being vulnerable. It is hard for me to ask for something if I don't know that someone else should give it, and I don't even trust other people to determine that well. I don't really want to present to them, 'Could you help me with this?' instead of saying 'this is what I need,' because if I say the former, they will then get to decide for themselves, O horror, and they might disagree with me!

The best response if I truly wish to become closer to God is to give up all the layers of pretense and ego and say just what comes to my mind. But what if it's wrong! Oh, no! Good- you'll learn humility. Why is that so bad?