cure for the curious heart
You’ve heard it being told that one should write what one knows. I sat down today to ask myself, “What exactly do I know of”?... At least enough to document on these diaries. Must I put on a facade and tell myself that I am perhaps an expert in the subject I have studied in university, Psychology? Shall I remind myself of the ease I have with numbers or the delight I find when I speak of my favorite shows? Or will I accept that my life, like those of most people around me, has been one full of difficulties? Of love and hate, deep joys and undescribable pain, demanding gains and easy losses. Nay, not in the holes they leave behind but in the switftness with which the things I place my hope in have vanished from the grip of my hands… unfortunately. Or maybe I have been fortunate enough to have things, people, and places that are hard to lose. Like the saying goes, it is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all. That, I have been told, is a good attitude to carry in life. Yet I sit here today, unsatisfied with this answer and a curious question that has boggled my mind since I noticed its recurring answers all around me.
The question goes, how can I live my life? Indeed, how can you live your life… when all that has been promised to you, weighed on the scales for you, shaken up, and stored for you is nothing short of suffering? Nothing short of punishment for sins that you may never fully repent of because of the steady fact of your humanity, having been born into this world a flawed chickling. One with broken wings but expected to fly high like the eagles in the sky. With scarce feathers but expected to survive the coldest of nights and an underdeveloped larynx, but expected to chirp away and fill the silence of the natural world surrounding you. With parents whose wings are just as broken, feathers just as scarce, and vocal cords just as immature. Yet you are somehow to believe that it is all fair and that to be a bird, nay, to be human is valuable. That complaining about life’s reality is to be a fool, to “victimise” oneself and to want an excuse not to carry the responsibilities bestowed upon you. Indeed, this entry is not about victimization. Neither is it about complacency, slothfulness, fixed mindsets, cognitive rigidity, inferiority complexes, and other words the stronger vessels among us use to gaslight the rest. This is about reverberating the comforting words of the Saviour who said, “In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33)
One cannot live without suffering and cannot suffer without living. It is in the pain that one has confirmation that his or her heart feels… in the soul sense, of course, because both the healthy of the physical heart and the rest fumble with all sorts of heartbreak, my dear reader. Certainly, perhaps you have also had a fair share of being in a constant strife with the flawedness of your nature. To be fully disgusted by how useless and helpless of a being you are if looked at for who you can really become. Yes, to look at the evil around you and to know you are just as capable of the same cruelty. To feel pain that makes death seem like a fresh breath of air. To cry out to your creator to blind you from the so-called beauty of existing… if there is even any. To seek and not find any single justification for your existence and to feel that your being is one big cosmic error that somehow slipped the mind of the omniscient one. How blasphemous!
And so… here you are and here I am, and here is all we have, yet here is gone and will now be in the past. “Here”, “Now”... the so-called “the present” is not real. It is a fleeting piece of cloud driven away by the winds of time. Yet you and I seem to float in this “present”, which might I add… is not really a present. If I am to be frank, it feels more like a burden sometimes, to sit with the reality one finds oneself in and to accept it’s momentariness and instability yet to build on it the foundation of the rest of one’s life, an unending compilation of serial presents. That will also be gone and then there is no more presents or futures, just the past… one big diachronic story of the life you and I have lived. Of the fallen teeth we uselessly brushed, wrinkled lips we passionately kissed, rotten paper we trusted with our brains’ secrets, dirty hands of strangers we excitedly shook, painful piles of faeces we carelessly filled in sewage tanks, meters of sand that our mammalian feet stepped on, billions of flowers our noses were too prideful to smell, thousands of books our eyes were too stiff to read, perhaps some money we selfishly hoarded in our bank accounts… and some other very human things we all do. And more very inhumane acts that we all do… the ones we do in secret, when no one is watching, especially God because we ask Him not to. As if somehow our nakedness is too much for him.
As if our every cell is not known to Him. Or our every hair placed and counted by Him, our blood circulated by the rhythm of His hands, our breath by the life He sustains in our lungs, our nails by the glue He places behind the skin of our fingers. As if we can create a darkness so deep that His light seems like the bottom of an abyss. As if our little human hands can fashion objects so grotesque that His beauty shys away. As if our fragile human hearts can feel pain so profoundly shattering that His healing hands cannot cure… for He is close to the broken hearted and to the weak, He gives strength. The foolish, He gives wisdom. The hungry, food. The lost, insight… the tired, rest… the fatalistic, hope… the sick, health… the lonely, company… the anxious, peace. For He said that if we ask, we shall receive. Indeed, we have not because we ask not. We drown in our pain because we refuse to sink into His will. We suffocate in our suffering because we deny His cross. We believe that our choices must not be challenged, and in doing so, challenge His authority, his love for all that he has created. Forgetting that the shepherd does not rejoice on seeing any of his flock get lost or devoured by a pack of wolves. The shepherd does not rejoice in our suffering but in our leaning on Him and knowing that in Him, even suffering is an answer to “How much does God love me”?... which, as a matter of fact, should be the question that guides us in every moment of our lives. How does one live one’s life, you ask, by reminding oneself of just how deep, how high, how colorful, how wide, how tall, how grand, how stable, how unmovable, how unreactive, how unchanging, how guaranteed… God’s love is for us. And that, my dear reader, is all that I know.
