Dealing with it

"I began to dread vainly proposing to myself the iterated dogma of science that all of life is material - that there are no undiscovered lands, even beyond the remotest stars for anything 'unnatural' to find a footing. Yet there struck in on this thought that matter is really as awful and unknown as spirit - that science itself merely dallies on the threshold, scarcely more than a passing glimpse of the actual wonders".

The Black Seal by Arthur Machen.

"We're Physical".

Roy Batty - Blade Runner.

So, pain, and plenty of it this last month.

Then came the rising tide - the news about the virus.

Mortality presses, sometimes like physical pain, when our youthful vitality ebbs in later years.

And, it's the Christian season where the weight of easter comes down like the unceasing rains of the wearing grey days.

So, then - death.

Here's what someone named Ian noted recently:
"We are born into this world kicking against the pricks, and on our deathbeds we will succumb to exhaustion, our flesh marred and torn to pieces by them. Futile resistance characterises so much of our lives, the hopeless retreat against inevitability. 

We cannot bear the truth: each of us will die, and absolutely nothing can be done to prevent it. Perhaps the most nauseating part of this, however, is that our dogged pursuit of life routinely misses its object. So many of our aims set their sights on life but fall hideously short. We enter the world congenitally inclined towards death-disguised-as-life, the addictions we will waste away from, overlong decades latent within our being, awaiting activation in history. But the pain and futility never stop us. Whether you’re Gilgamesh, Juan Ponce de Leon, Roy Batty, or Drake, we’re all always hunting after more life. 

We all need to hear the truth that brings our intuitions and suspicions to completion, because hope only ever lies on the other side of the unmasking of its counterfeits. We must own the hard truth. The worst thing that could happen to you already has: you’ve been born into a world that seeks your degradation and devastation. The suspicion that lurks within all your experience on this planet, in the joys cut short and the injuries you’re certain you didn’t deserve — as well as the ones you think you may have — is correct. But is there anything good on the other side of this brutal truth?"


There are several things here that should 'jolt' us.

The struggle spoken in the first statement is perhaps something we don't examine that much, except perhaps in brief moments when it sneaks up on us, because it's terrifying to encounter.
We invest everything into something that is so small and over so quickly. I still feel about twenty in my mind, but my body is beginning to slip further and further into decay - you come to know that escape isn't possible.

And yet, we want it to be, need it to be.
We fall so "hideously short" of what we hope to reach, but something deep inside us keeps yearning anyway - we're desperately, insatiably hungry for more... we're physical, and that magnificence is supposed to last.

The shock is that life isn't the splendour it should be.
We fight, we claw out a little piece of something, but we know there's meant to be so much more, and that truth and our current limitations scare us as we are dragged ever closer to the end. So we bounce along the surface, not allowing these overwhelming, immense truths to penetrate our sand castles. Afraid or conditioned, we choose not to do anything that leads us away from our little lives that would allow the "big picture" we encountered when we were young to penetrate us. The brutal truths don't go away, but we muffle the sound of what they are trying to say - the final moment is coming, so get your head together!

I was eaten up with despair and dread (yes, hell is real) when I lost my wife to cancer. I couldn't see anything in the black of that moment, but the truth is that there is more than the pain, the suffering and even the loss we encounter in this life, even in the very folds of death.

We're all looking, needing there to be more.

The reason we scramble so hard is because we all know that there's meant to be so much more. That is why Christianity counts - not all the religiosity, or the pretensions or preconceptions that are so often what we see and use to pigeon-hole this as "something not to worry about".

Here's why it counts.

Give it some time, why there's still time to take.