We are meant to breathe

We are meant to breathe

Those people who seek to understand ‘life’. The ‘why’ of it? The ‘reason’ we are here? Can come across as depressing too many, who don’t understand why numerous people seem compelled to dig deeper into the inscrutability of their lives.  While it is true that everyone accepts that our lives are short, that time seems to be faster than our 60 minute hour seems to tell us, yet after this is said, it is buried under other endeavors.  At times to actually understand how temporal we are can cause terror, at other times relief. 

Youth is idolized, yet it is probably the shortest period of our lives, important to be sure, but not as important as each subsequent stage.  Power and success are gods, yet when most people achieve it, the cost is often more pricey than once believed.  I have spoken to men and women who mourn what they had to give up in order achieving some sort of cultural mandate to succeed at all cost.  Families were lost, children raised without their parents being home and tragedy often followed.  Successes, beauty and youth are good, but not at the cost of everything that is actually more important. 

I struggle with this everyday, what is more important, why am I here, just what is our life all about.  When the mundane is made into ‘all that is’….it is then I believe that many people feel like they are enclosed inside a very large plastic bag with only one hole for breathing.  It is the feeling of slowly dying, but death does not come, an inner emptiness, as if life is nothing more than rush hour on a very hot summer afternoon.  When the reality hits home, that we are perhaps here to ‘seek’, that we are indeed pilgrims with no real resting place, perhaps it is then that the paradox kicks in….peace is found. 

Seeking some sort of closed system only makes things worse.  That goes for philosophy, theology as well as religion.  The heart of men and women, their longings, even if unconscious, can’t be imprisoned by any one understanding of life.  However when a path chosen, deepened, lived out… or sought to be lived out….will often lead to the open-endedness of reality. Not one that will give some sort of absolute answer to the riddle of our existence.  Doubt, about what we are brainwashed into believing is most important, is a vital part of our search.  When we seek some sort of rest, closure, then trouble starts, for we will find that we have to defend our ‘ideology’, seeking for truth stops, building defenses begins.

We are meant to breathe deeply from the center of our souls.  The key, as is shown in many of our great works of art and in our literature and scriptures, is the absolute reality of love, which I believe points to the reality of the soul.  The food of the soul, that which gives it life, is love.  It is love that opens us up. It allows the true death to all that is unimportant to this truth.  That can in the end, lead to a world that is actually a good place to live, or can be.  Or perhaps, it is only a desire that this can happen, that the transformation of the world is not possible.