Life is so... full.
I have a hard enough time trying to wade through the many ideas floating around in the world, about what a good friend is, through my personal struggles against my own flaws, through trying to figure out what is true and real, through the world's expectations of what women ought to be, and so on. On what grounds do I believe anything? The resulting confusion is, in my case, a constant sea of sorrow and hesitance. After all, I could always be wrong, and being wrong hurts.
In dark times, I can listen to sad, sorrowful songs about love lost, perilous confusion, the beauty of pain - the realism of the emotion encapsulates me. In my highest times, I find myself joyous, sensible, serene, and determinedly looking to the future.
This dichotomous relationship I have with reality is probably the same struggle that everyone has. Do I pick sorrow, or do I pick joy? To pick sorrow is easy - it requires no work, is comfortable, and allows me to fully "be myself", but it is a miserable, pathetic existence. To pick joy is hard - it requires hard work, sacrifice, pain, humbling, and a strength that I'm not sure that I have, but the reward is natural access to true love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control. Obviously, picking joy takes more work, but that's like choosing not to eat because I'm too lazy to make anything, and you can only do that for so long before hunger forces you to crawl desperately to the kitchen cabinets. (Or, I guess, you could decide not to, and die.)
If this is about life and reality, then it is necessarily about God. As I learn more and more about who God is, I have begun to really see and understand that He is love, truth, goodness, existence, reason, and joy, and wherever those things exist, He is there. Pursuing Him means pursuing those things. And, the more I study, the more clearly I see that I am indeed looking through a mirror dimly lit, and that my knowledge of that list of things is so horribly incomplete. I must always be a student of this world; willing to learn, willing to be wrong, willing to grow. I must always be willing to transform my mind, wash my brain of the things I think I know, and exchange the lie for the truth. It is incredibly painful, but Christ allows me - and everyone else - to rise from the ashes of such a fire like a phoenix. I am in constant hope that my temple is a more suitable place for my Lord to inhabit, and for my members to be more suitable extensions of His being.
Pain in beautiful because it signifies that I am staring into an unfamiliar sector of Reality, and don't know how to navigate it yet. Pain is the presence of my choice between Reality and my flawed understanding of it. Through pain, we understand better, if we allow ourselves to hurt.
This blog is the publicized journal of my struggle to steadily fix my life's aim on reality and virtue.
