This Is The Thing

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The uneasiness of life is exciting while also creating a neurosis of worry. Life has a way being contradictory like that. I was thinking about this new job that I have and how it evaporated a lot of the stress in my life about finances. It also gave me way more freedom than my previous job. You say what you're working on at the beginning of the day and are trusted to do it. They'll know if you don't.

Last night I went to a local gathering of tech entrepreneurs called TechPint. One of the guys there who spoke talked about how employees are worth their pay and how you never overpay for a good and talented employee. The point filtered down into how hiring the right employee is crucial.

But this? This is just a tangent. My mind is drifting into something else. Struggle. I'm afraid, genuinely, of accidentally removing the struggle from my life, of becoming apathetic and having to "make up" challenges in life to excuse a cushioned life. But the issue is with the cushioned life.

Not to say that you should willingly inflict suffering upon yourself.

What is self?

Self is a culmination of our relations to our Creator and one another. Without these two things, identity becomes a nothingness. A story of a monk who spoke to a man dwelling in hell has the man who was there saying that in hell, everyone is facing away from one another no man can see another's face.

So I suppose that I am really afraid of dwelling in hell, of dwelling in the comfortable blanket fort of a childhood fantasy where I can be lost in a forced innocence. I can make up dragons rather than confront the ones that are actively breathing heat and lies past my ears. What is that quote from Chesterton?

“Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

Our fairytales? Our stories? Our shows and movies? They serve more to form ideas, to escape the world that would confront us. We have lost the meaning of fairytales and imagination because we have become lost in them. 

But there is hope. There is always a hope. We were born to hope. Yet remain these three: faith, hope, love. Hope is eternal. It is why we believe so sincerely in the better. That is hope. But we have idolized hope. We have separated it from faith and love. Faith is a testimony of its origins. Love is the better enacted by us. We are stuck somewhere in the middle.

Classically these tales had faith, an origin, a creator, something real and tangible. A god became too real for us and we abandoned faith. And so we tried to make hope its own origin. That proved fruitless in the most literal way. Love had nothing. With nothing for hope to funnel through to love, love became an idea, a vague word that could mean anything.

Love was kind and patient. Now, love is blind. It was commonly known more so as "charity," as actionable affection. While emotional affection may drive the actionable, actionable affection sustains emotional affection.

But the road to life is difficult, the way narrow, and few ever find. In the book The Mountain Of Silence, Fr. Maximos calls this the imprudence of the heart, meaning "the heart is not even aware what its true interests are (64)." Perhaps a common thread to be found between us in this regard is boredom.

Maybe it is deeper, but the common remedy seems to be communion. It doesn't remove the suffering, the struggle, the pain. It gives meaning to it. It reveals what the true interests of the heart are. 

Yet remain these three: faith, hope, love. Hope is eternal. It is us we are that middle. God is faith and love is our neighbor.