One day, you wake up and realize: this is it. My life’s a block of marble. Mostly uncarved by my own hands (what puny chisels fingernails make!). Not to say it’s remained perfectly unchanged over the years, but oh, how much of its distinct shape has developed only due to weathering! Accidental differentiation!
This reflective morning, you ask yourself: Why have I just left myself out here like this? Living, breathing, yet still without a sufficiently meaningful say in my own life’s construction? Friends, listen closely when I say: Heartfelt prayer is the daybreak of agency.
Belief in self, a warming of the spirit, comes from heights above you. Think: when you pour yourself some morning coffee, does the pot rise above and pour down into the waiting cup? Of course, it does. It would be ridiculous to imagine the reverse of this.
To live honestly, you must learn to contain yourself. Let yourself be filled to the absolute brim with spirit, for any remaining space will be rounded out with habitual reflexes. The soul desires to drink the world black! The capacity for wisdom is first formed from being able to accept without excessive indigestion: truth, in its purest state, is an absolutely acquired taste!
Your life is your life’s work. So work! And work like a river, some places a headlong rush, some spots slower. But don’t you dare abandon movement until the moment your body of work finds its body of water. Bear much to give birth to more!
Life gets abstracted more by the day. First, they pull the spirit away, then, a classic bait-and-switch, they do the same to the material. What are we left with? Virtually everything, and absolutely nothing.
Today, you exist as undercarved stone, and I know you can carve more than wrinkles! Without faith, you have nothing to stand on but bloated, ever-undulating consensus. You let it rock your anxiety to sleep, how much still the same crying child! But hear me, friends, hear me out: Solid ground is just a leap away! Get away from here to go further! Away from the unclaimed and unnamed and toward your signature fate!
From there, the reins get handed over. Much has begun in you, but only now are you in position to harness it, and catch up with your own beginning. Today, you break ground, which is the great fixing of self.
Your unreflected habits are the unaccountable bureaucracy in your soul. Today, I dare you to throw them off! Decide and do not stall waiting on habitual approval. Not just war, life is also something that must be waged.
Being too realistic somehow kept you at arm’s length from bare reality itself. As living, breathing, and yes, also dying organic substance. Being realistic, in the end, was a defense mechanism. Both from possible failure in the short term and from the ultimate truth of your condition. A truth you cannot reliably fight against except through the most dangerous means of all: weapons of mass distraction! Better to make a truce and come to terms with it, even if you give up a little ground. We pay ourselves back in the end anyhow.