from The Anchor

Am I aware that I have written about things with This Girl for a good solid five posts now? Yes. 
Am I aware that this may be getting a bit monotonous for you? Yes. 
Am I myself bored with it? Absolutely. 


It's time for new territory to be explored, new things to be uncovered, news posts on different subjects to be written (with a few pop-rock satirical comments thrown in coupled with grotesque and politically inappropriate images). But there must be some ending to these posts, some since of cohesion.

As human creatures, I think, we seek to endow almost anything and everything with meaning. And if I want to find meaning in all that's happened, perhaps the worst route to go is to draw forth negative meanings from the events. The meaning we fix to events says less about the events and more about ourselves, and what we "read out of" these events, too, tells us only about our interpretations of those events. "Everything boils down to interpretation." They say assumptions and perspectives lie at the root of everything; but these have no foundation without our interpretations. How we interpret life's happenings, good or bad, dovetails directly into our perspective of things. And if I'm to interpret these events, these interpretations don't come from a vacuum but from all the other shit going on in my heart and soul. How I approach everything with The Girl says almost nothing about what actually transpired in the year and so-many months we've known each other, and my approach says almost everything about how I've come to perceive those events. Ladling them with meaning, I let the events take on a shape and character formerly far-gone, and then I interpret not the events but the "events-bloated-with-meaning", and I receive not a pure understanding of the event but an understanding undergirded and guided by my interpretations, assumptions, perspectives, everything. And what, then, is my perspective on all this?

Over the past few days I've had the time (and energy, surprisingly enough) to really crawl deep into my heart and take a hard look at what's going on there. And I find that my heart finds itself in this super-tension between my Ultimate Dream and my interpretations of reality. My hope for the fulfillment of my dream is intoxicating, even if I deny it to be so; and so overwhelming is this desire that even the silliest and most simplistic events gather their own meaning. Everything with Jessica, I know what it is: just something that happens. And it happens a lot. I've been through it before, and I'll probably be through it again. Many of my friends are going through the same thing. There's no intrinsic meaning to what happened, except that two people connected, flourished, and then that flourishing was snuffed out. This pattern of birth, flourishing, death and then decay permeates everything in the cosmos, from the biological makeup of our world to the physiological structure of our bodies, from the rhythms of the stock market to relationships themselves. Hell, the entire universe in all its trimmings is already in its final stages (we call this entropy; google it). We're naive if we think that relationships are born, then flourish forever. If it happens, consider yourself blessed--but most often relationships, like life and weather, have their seasons. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes that when we measure the worth of everything in its infiniteness.

Far too often, with girls, I measure the meaning of our connection by the potential we have. I measure the worth of the friendship not in what it was but in what it could've been. With The Girl, I constantly plunge the imaginative depths of fantasy, spinning images and stories and feelings associated with sharing my life with her. Granted, these are fantasies, and when I step back and analyze them, I can see that quite clearly; "There's no way it'd actually be like that, but it's a nice thought." The days we shared, the'y're not without meaning. The laughter is no less real, the connection we had no less authentic, the way we were wholly open with one another and accepting of the others... Those days, those experiences, aren't rendered invalid because of how it turned out (which, ultimately, is just to say it didn't turn out how I wanted; and if the value of everything is found only in things panning out how we want them to, then we're going to be sorely eviscerated). The value isn't just about the destination; much of it's wrapped up in the journey. If those things that turn sour at the end of the day are declared meaningless, then much of life would be a waste. Sometimes things like this happen, and maybe instead of mourning the loss we should just cherish the memories, accept what's happened, and keep trucking along? Take what I can from this and use such gathered "wisdom" (if we can call it that) to do things a bit better next time around?

I always advocate looking at reality and being honest about it. Not buying into ridiculous and obviously-flawed paradigms, and wrestling through the inconsistencies in your own worldview to see where you've been buying into lies, where you've been believing something just because you want to. I believe, wholeheartedly, that acknowledging the reality of the world is something humanity--and Christianity not excluded--needs to do (at the same time acknowledging, quite ironically, that such hard-edged examination of the world won't be done in a vacuum, and our perception of the world, seemingly moving in congruence with reality, is often in-congruent at various points). This can be a dangerous task, as I've come to find. Whenever we tweak perception, we also tweak practice. How we live our lives is changed, and not just in the peripheral areas: the foundation can be shaken when we seek to root out the flaws in our perspectives, and when this happens, we're left with three choices (and I've written about these extensively elsewhere, so I'll be brief). There's (1) Resignation (just throwing our hands in the air and sitting on our asses, giving up on the whole enterprise altogether. Resignation's not the best route to go, but it's easy and appetizing; equally drawing is (2) cognitive dissonance: instead of wrestling with the inconsistencies, we ignore them. We cover our eyes, plug our ears, and scream bloody mary to drown out reality's noise. Both of these paths are most common, and both hold no real value. The third (and trickiest) is (3) Rebuilding: wrestling through these things, being honest with them, and structuring your life accordingly. This isn't the escapism of resignation or the cognitive dissonance of ignorance; it's what I deem the appropriate response to reality's tweaking ("How to measure an appropriate response?" The Answer: eudaimonia. But this is a post for another time).

Beholding the world can be a dizzying (and even nauseating) thing, and trying to figure out how to live in accordance with it is equally difficult. Over the last couple years, I've dibbled and dabbled in different ways of living. Some are escapist in nature, some are guilt-driven, all are my attempts at trying to align my praxis with perception without realizing that, because praxis is always connected to perception, reworking perception until it leads to a consistent praxis is the way to go. I'm coming to the point where I'm bringing the pieces together, finding some clarity and cohesion, experiencing hope and peace and joy yet again (and hoping, praying, and fighting for this to not be some passing craze but a milestone in my life). All of this ties into the beginning of this post, because I've come to see that in a world riddled with death and decay, a world full of senseless and barbaric acts, a world where dreams most often don't come true and where suffering waits around each and every corner, the way I perceive things with Jessica is more important now than ever before.

If I'm to claim, as I would do before, that everything with us was meaningless, then I'm acknowledging on one hand the Uncertainty of life while acting as if, on the other, the best things in life last forever. See the inconsistency? I say "Nothing lasts forever" and then consider everything a waste when it doesn't last forever. What kind of perspective is this? Certainly the most hopeless one, the one most void of meaning and significance. Life comes nothing more than the passing of different wastes and their shadows lingering in the present and stretching into the future. The years pass and the world grows darker and the heart dimmer and then there's nothing left but a bent-over crone with wrinkled hands and washboard ribs and deep-set eyes void of hope and purpose. This is the life I see every morning walking downtown, the life I see every day on the streets outside my home, every evening in the cafes and bars and diners. It's an easy thing to become a monster; we're already halfway there. Maybe we just need a good kick, even a nudge, to send us over the edge. 

Times like these, we need to be aware of what's happening in our hearts. Forget that, and you'll lose everything. Jesus said something about gaining the whole world but forfeiting our souls: in our thirst for success, in our craving to satisfy our desires, in our lust to get ahead, this happens every day, every hour, every minute. Our hearts are growing darker and the world's content with this. We're just playing into its hand. "The World" isn't just reality; I'm convinced it's greater than that, something encompassing all the negative and unlovable things in the world, and it's more than happy to see its power grow as people submit to it in ignorance and naivety. Every time we count our checkbook and feel good about ourselves, every time we exalt ourselves above our fellow human beings, every time we measure our worth by how our apparent successes, we're just another extenuation of the world's foothold. And when we measure our life by what lasts the longest, we're also playing into the world's hand, because by doing that, everything loses its meaning, and when that happens, it's not a far cry until we're just shadowy remnants of what we once were. I've seen this, I've experienced this, and it has to come to an end. 

I can't look at how things went down with Jessica--or countless other friendships and hoped-for relationships in my life--and declare all that we had void and bankrupt. As an aside, this whole thing about "true friends" never leaving you, that's just bullshit. It assumes a friendship is valid only if it lasts for a lifetime. Yes, a lifelong friend is a valuable thing, the most wonderful kind of friendship (minus good marriage), but it's not the end-all-be-all of friendships. There are different kinds of friendships with their different highs and different lows, and when a friendship runs it course, it shouldn't be labeled a Waste because it didn't last forever. A flower isn't deemed worthless because one day it'll die. It's cherished for what it is when it is, and that's how it is with friendships. We cherish the memories, we thank God for the good times, we treasure the experiences, and we hold these people in our hearts as we go about our lives. No friendship is a waste, because every friendship--from birth to flourishing to death--teaches us lessons, and the friendships form us and mold us into who we are. If you're reading through these posts and thinking I'm harboring ill-will towards her, or if you're convinced that there's nothing but bitterness and regret in my disposition towards her, you're quite mistaken. She does hold quite the place in my heart--why else would all that's happened become front-and-center in my life?--and I honestly and genuinely hope that she makes it: that she experiences her dreams, that she gets to where she wants to go, that she finds what she's looking for. And with that said, I'm going to put an end to all these posts welling up from my thoughts and feelings over what's happened. Now we're moving on to better and brighter things.