The Life

In case any one was wondering, I love what I do. Seriously.

Today, as always, was Mondo-Thursday, a day consisting of over 9 hours of classes, 2 hours of work, and a long day with little opportunity to stop, to rest, to breathe...and to eat. Yet, for some reason, my Thursdays leave me at 9 PM in some sort of weird ecstatic state of utter sufficient joy.

Amazing.

From translating Hesiod to analysis of Priority monist and Assertion to Phenomenology to the genius, and sometimes quasi-insanity, of the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. I love it.

Is there any greater blessing than fulfilling the person God made you to be? I mean, I'm not saying that for some strange, prodigious reason I have a precise and minute grip on my entire being and I have nothing left in this world via self-reflection to unveil and reveal. But, in the enigma of identity, both the vulgar shallows and the rigorous depths, we are given glimpses in life of our God-created origins which are meant to be our guiding lights on paths less, or not, travelled. Who are we? We attempt our entire lives to figure that out and in the process of that self-discovery we run into gaping potholes which drastically and tragically hinder our voyage.

It's our fallenness. Our depraved human condition. It's this world constantly raped and scorned by the pain and birth pangs of our broken state. It's the holes, the darkness, the inner deeps in our very existence which no drink or drug, no kiss nor knick-knack, no trinket nor trade-off, can ever satisfy such a hole (no matter how hard we try).

Too often we bare witness to broken people. We witness wrecks who hammer and pound a boyfriend, a hobby, mass quantities of hedonism and intellectualism, in order to feel complete, whole, full. In Kierkegaard's Either/Or he presents the disillusioned picture of the Seducer Johannes, who in the seduction of Cordelia, pleasures himself not with the sex, nor the relationship, nor even the social aspect, but in the pure aspect of the chase in the avoidance of the dubious 'sin' of boredom. For the aesthetic, such as the Seducer, boredom is the deepest of flaws, so deep that the aesthetic pleasure and beauty seeker sacrifices history, memory, and even his very identity as a person, for the sake of avoiding feelings of triviality and the impending lack of novelty and excitement. For the Seducer it is better to forget everything, good and bad, pleasurable and uneventful, than to place one's self into the ruts of friendship, marriage, vocation, and structure of the ethical system. Let one's hair into the wind, admit the lack of concrete meaning in life, and, in the quoting of Hesiod's Theogony concerning the artful and pleasurable Muses;

For if someone has pain and newly scorned grief
he would shrivel dry, grievous in the heart, yet the singer,
the servant of the Muses, hymns songs of men of old
and of the blest gods who dwell atop Olympus,
and at once surely the suffering man forgets his anxiety
he does not remember any cares. (Theogony 98-102)

In sum, for the Seducer, the aesthetic, and the average joe and jane seeking to subdue their inner emptiness, the only way to temporarily avoid the pain via one's busyness and interest for the sake of forgetting the grievous hearts that rest there.

We cannot fill these empty chasims on our owns. In fact, though we cannot subdue the entirety of our wounds, we still are persons, children of God, created in His image.

And thus, we are people. Not individuals who self-decide who we are; we are people whose very identities are God created. To fulfil who God created us to be is to find our truest joy, to fit in our skin, to realize that our existence is not one of completion in this world. Our reality is not fulfiled until on that final day we exalt to the uttermost in our Lord and Savior. It is then our natures and truest meaning is made real. We become less spector and more angelic.

I love life. I love knowing I am inching towards the direct center that God is (tho I have far to go)
life is good