Wow!!! day 30. This journey is almost over and if I am honest I do not feel redeemed yet. I hoped that by sacrificing so many tools of instant gratification my head, body, soul, mind, all of it, would become aligned and I would find the answers that I seek, but honestly I feel more confused than ever.
There is something I no longer can deny, I have never had the guts to admit this because I didn't want to offend anybody, and I was scared to alienate myself, but I have noticed that I am a champion at alienating myself anyway so I might as well spill the beans. The only reason why I feel it is important to confess this, is because maybe there are others out there who are silently struggling with the same thing. My name is Edith and I have two parts that are constantly battling, and they have been battling as long as I can remember. I am the reluctant Atheist and the hopeful believer. A part of me believes in everything, a part of me believes in nothing. Forever torn. Forever wondering, and this is the true core of all my confusion and suffering, because I cannot pick a side.
I had a long conversation with an extremely wise women today. I am always grateful for our talks because she has this wonderful ability to put things into perspective, always guiding never judging, always more helpful than she ever realises. She is the same age as me, but in some ways she is many years ahead of me. She brought it to my attention that I have removed all my coping mechanisms in one go...the smoking, and drinking and all that...and now I have to come to terms with all my defence mechanisms; How I push things away, how I rationalise things, how I obsess, how I want to control everything, how I protect myself from the world, and how I often look for the path of least resistance even tough I know it is not what I truly desire. Her advice was that I should not be so hard on myself, and that I should give things time, and that I should have faith that my psyche will only allow me to make a move when I am ready, and not a moment sooner. My immediate response was "But how does one stop being mad at God?"...I guess that means that I must believe in him considering that I have been mad at him for a very long time. "Stop being mad at yourself first" was her answer. I wish I knew how.
Let me tell you a little more about my conundrum. Some of you may be able to emphasise and others may not have a clue what I am talking about but here goes...To have faith, you need to believe in things that you can not see, and things that cannot be proven. You have to have hope, and hope and faith are often confirmed by feelings, emotions, by someone trusting their gut, trusting their heart. The reluctant atheist in me thinks this all just sounds like wishful thinking, and it wonders where the line between delusion and hope is. I have said before hope can trap you. Also I do not trust my heart or my gut at all anymore, I have before and it lead me to places I would have been better off never to have visited in the first place. So I am left with my mind, and what I call the voice of Reason. My wise friend said that I named it the voice of reason to make it sound like it has authority, but maybe it is not really the voice of reason after all, still it is the only thing I trust at the moment. The voice of reason does not believe in anything it cannot see, or cannot explain, it looks at the facts and then draws a conclusion, it is not emotional, and believes that everything is completely in my own hands, I am the master of my own fate, and that I should eliminate anybody that stands in my way, holds me back, or doesn't serve me. I don't like the voice of reason. I love the idea of destiny and that we are all part of a grand story, but just because I want to believe in things, doesn't mean I can. My mind simply doesn't work that way. My recurring prayer is that the voice of reason will be proven wrong...but it never has been and it seems like it never will be...perhaps it is the part of me I should give into, the part of me I need to become. I have heard many times that you have to find the truth within yourself, that there are some things that you just know, and my response is that there have been many things that I just knew, things that my heart and my gut swore to me to be the truth, and it turned out to be false, heartbreakingly false. So the only reason for me to have faith is if something external happens, something magical, something majestic, something that I could not have just imagined or believed I saw simply because I wanted to see it, something beautiful is necessary to restore my faith, but that is not how things work is it. Still, I am hoping for this to happen, and my hope has trapped me in a loop. I do not trust my own feelings about anything anymore and I definitely cannot trust someone else's feelings. This is my dilemma, the battle between hoping to have faith, and not believing in anything at all. The storm that is continually raging, and the worst part is it is completely beyond my control...or I guess that is not true, I do have a choice. I can choose to believe in nothing at all...I understand the logic, but for some reason this saddens me.
To be continued....
No comments:
Post a Comment