Nothing.
The imperative is to say ‘yes’ to life. Accept now. Embrace the present, whole heartedly, loving the precise quality of what is.
Why do I do this? Why am I stuck on this tune? It is grating to my ego, torture to the little self that creates the artificial fantasy in which I exist. He would much rather contemplate suicide, imagine some future of escape, wallow in the suggestion of perplexity that such an ‘untimely’ end might create among those around me. Or, somewhat less drastically, he would love to get enmeshed in the depression he creates, the endless wailing, the never ending swell and fall of dread and despair that my journal has so tediously documented. And it implies the end of this; no more familiar cyclical moodiness, the end of the illusion in which I have invested my whole life up to this point. The end of him.
Can I surrender all that? Am I capable of that much surrender? Can I endure the removal of the ‘core’ of me, the substance I have become? Can I relinquish this fond little mottled clay sculpture to which I have been adding bit after bit for over fifty years, in the hopes of finally, one day, becoming something?
Walk into the wilderness. Leave the roads and paths behind. Veer away, flee the light pollution, head into the night, find stars.
I ask myself, “You want a revolution? Want to change the world?” I accuse myself, “You just want to talk about it. Full of shit.”
Well, I think, at least half of that’s OK; full is good. Shit is not so good.
“You wear your cowardice like a badge, you wallow in your cream and sugar existence like that is all there is. And if you say so, then it will be. But you know that is not what you really want. There is an un-discardable kernel in you, and no matter how much you coat it thickly, pave it over, bury it under distraction—it can still be heard; you feel it. It feels you.”
“It is you.”
Hm. So, to survive, to go on as-is, denial is the only option. And it has been denial all the way up until now. A masquerade of living. I have been pretending to be alive. It doesn’t matter why, really, but it is probably because it all just scares me so much. And it all waits for me. And I either face it now, or at the end.
But if I know all this, if I am aware of the denial, it cannot remain denial. It becomes a willful lie.
<Sigh>
It sucks to be me right now. Either that, or it is the greatest thing that ever happened to me.