Sunday 16 July 2017

I'm older than I've ever been, but I'm younger than I'll ever be again.

The older I get, the younger I feel. I realize more and more that in the vastness of time and history I am indeed very young, insignificantly young, and faced with the infinite knowledge that has passed through the minds of mankind I know very little and still have much to learn.

Some days this fills me with hope and determination, thinking of all the things I can still learn, all the marvels yet undiscovered. Other days it fills me with anxiety, questioning why I have to struggle to make nothing out of nothing. Dangling from one side to the other, constructing and deconstructing my own experience time and time again, like the rising and setting sun.

I keep going back and forth between jaded and naive; trying desperately to hold on to that childish belief that everyone is inherently good, that we're all just hurt little children who can be cured with kindness while the concrete walls around my heart grow thicker and taller and the barbed wire expands. I want to remain open, innocent and loving, but I also want to remain, to be whole and not broken.

I want to forgive but I want to learn from the experience. There is a sort of resistance, a rebellion, that forces me to crack my own walls and let whatever is outside leak in, whether it's healing tenderness or corrosive aggression. Whatever seeps in causes some sort of reaction and transformation, no matter how many times concerned loved ones tell me to "not let it affect" me.

I let it affect me, time and time again, I let it break me down or lift me up in pieces, and then I put myself back together somehow in a different way. Again, trying desperately to remain the same but changing and transforming with every little encounter. It's the blessing and curse of being sensitive, of being aware of every little detail, of experiencing the mundane as sublime. To love without dying knowing you will die without love. To take on every risk even if it will destroy you, and hiding out when the monsters are too scary, but only to catch your breath and come back out.

With every battle, the truth remains that it can be my last. Every day can be the last, eventually one day will be. Perhaps the anxiety of this day motivates both the courage and the fear, no matter how much I think in my head that I do not fear death.

This is the human condition.