So now that I’ve done this:
With the excuse that I simply needed to add some character to my recently-rendered hairless visage, I think it’s now impossible not to make some larger, more encompassing statement about the recent events in my life, which, yes, has reached its Quarter-mark. If you haven’t been playing along with the home edition of our show, I’ve quit my job, lost my faith, shaved my head, pierced my ears and started challenging myself along various personal development veins all over the last month or two. You might think this all adds up to one big, dishonest, emotional attempt to grab hold of my youth or capture some fading opportunities, but you’d be wrong. Just like any emotional event might knock you far enough off the track of a habit or standard so you can re-examine it with a fresh perspective, the only point my age plays is a reminder that there is only one life to live, and any missed opportunities serve only to remind me that nothing artificial should keep me from perusing the life I want, even if those things are tough to leave behind. Do note: I think people can succeed as I’m looking to within social structures (we all have to to some degree) – so it’s not like I’ve left my faith behind to pursue this, rather, I confronted the fact that I don’t think it’s true, and actually have been questioning all else as a result of that victory over comfort and the idea of belief.
For years now I’ve marveled at the thought that every person has within them some unexpressed, richer, fuller self beneath the programming, clean of the paint of standards that warps and cracks around us as we flex that identity beneath, all too often giving in at last to let the paint shell dry and forever act as some foreign skin keeping us from true expression and honest connection with all the other paintskin mannequins.
Kafka said of books:
“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
And I find there are axes everywhere. So, on one hand I’m confronting. Confronting truth, and untruth, separating the real from the unreal, the right from the comfortable. I’m sanding off the paint to find my canvas and make my own work of art. My Christian perspective said the same things about worldliness, that it was the paint, the bug on my projector that ruined the movie, but Christianity, all religion, tradition and comfort – these are the bugs, and all one in the same. It’s taking the axe to these that lets the statue within the marble free, not to embrace worldliness in the sense of materialism or hedonism, but to embrace the world as we see it for what it really is: everything.
“Things are entirely what they seem to be and behind them…there is nothing” -Jean-Paul Sartre
And that’s why I’ve returned again and again to the theme of deconstructing and reconstructing. Not because I think man’s ideal state is one of chaos, but because I know that I need to detox from comfort, pursue every inclination that hints at more, and each one that hints at less.
Pragmatically: I’m on a journey, and I aim to risk.
