Cross Roads

Bleugh. The feeling before the day starts, before I have to weave my way between jobs and new things. Bleugh.

I have felt depressed on and off throughout my life. My anxieties can feel like a steam pipe with no
safety valve, whereas other times I feel that luck or some good force thrills me on to great heights.

My emotions are so textured by physical sensations and yet so often I fail to take note of the way  the body is not only symptomatically revealing the brain and the emotions but is simultaneously impacting the emotions.

Yesterday afternoon I saw my fiancée's godson and her best friend. In speaking to a person I like but don't know so well, and in playing and smiling with this 2 year old, this kind and very simple person I came away so positive and relaxed. I felt tired but in a good way. Not driven into knots but just tired after exertion and play.

I liked Catholicism for a long time. It fit me for different reasons. It allowed me to channel my love of history (the passage of time, the way one's personal actions have ramifications down the generations), my love of people (spending time with one another in a purposeful community), my love of reflection and solitude (finding peace in purposeful thought - prayer -, helping others, having routine, and in moments of gratitude). However it also exacerbated and made more deeply riven feelings of compulsion (I have to act a certain way or I would lose God, or at least connection with Him which is as good as), of responsibility (after my friend's suicide it made me think I should have saved him), of guilt (if I didn't feel peaceful I thought I'd lost God, so would descend into spirals of damning thoughts after a wank or anything really), and of over-thinking (I lost my appreciation of the joy of simply being).

I have felt at a cross-roads for a little while now. How do I confidently step into the future with so much sadness weighing me down? How do I function if I cannot stop my mind from overthinking? How does my mind have direction if I haven't crystallized a core essence of purpose and understanding of life? These existential questions then run in with the more immediate and personal: what job and career shall I do? One that makes me fulfilled and fits my remit of skills? How much does this one career define my life and its purpose?

I believe I am growing. I went from self vain-glory, to exploration of the mind through highs and then to the idealism of spirituality, then into the self-confidence of religion, and now I feel once again stripped. But to be stripped back is a good place for renewed growth. I feel I understand myself better than ever even if right now I feel sad a lot and lacking energy.

I believe positive steps are necessary and just around the bend. Work on the body and its symptoms and then the mind will be more positive to tackle its problems.

Tired; Not Tired

With aching spine, legs and eyes

My being cries for sleep.

It doesn't matter, the night flies

I'm still here, laptop open, sad heap.

Growing older and knowing less

Reading over what I had written when I started this blog I can feel how much I've already changed. I've gotten older, a little more cynical perhaps too. I've realized a token of Socrates' wisdom: that we really have such little knowledge.

I thought - and still sometimes do - that I could piece the whole puzzle of life (existence, the cosmos, people, nature, evolution, all of it) into a picture that if not complete, is simply missing the pieces at the edges. It is an enjoyable and thoughtful past-time: but who am I to comprehend the most elusive question; what is our nature, and does life have a deeper meaning?

We really are as children before the deep enigma of Life. 

I miss the walks in the forests and the fields of back home

The heart is willful, the mind unruly.
I try to find quiet, but never quite manage it.
I want peace but there is not room to breathe.
Living on campus is fun.
There is a bizarre sense of the constant rush of people.
But, I do miss the gentle walks, the cool wind on my face, the empty path in the woods.
These lift up my entire being,
They remind me I have a soul.

Being cut off from the natural world is like having an umbilical cord cut.

Fragility, Acceptance, Resilience - God/ peace/ fullness can seem F A R off; but it is in reach

I haven't written in a long while. A lot has happened. My heart has hurt, my head has hurt and I've wondered at times if I am a good person. I do so want to be a good person. I think deeply but I know my limits. The fragility of the human temperament is incredible; however, so too is it's resilience.

For me I have woken up one morning and felt awful emotionally, physically, mentally, or spirituality - a twist of chance: a particular encounter or conversation; a moment of serenity breaking through the daily stresses - and by that evening have gone to bed contented (and vice versa too).

I am grateful for the life I have. I want to live in God's embrace. I want to be stronger in keeping to resolutions, big and small: committed to what I intend to do. Often I get distracted, and wander off the good road of perseverance and the satisfaction that that brings, and in its place choose immediate pleasures. From watching a television show when I could be using that time reading; to looking at pornography; to drinking; to smoking - I am not perfect. But I have never been perfect. I am not. And it is in my lowliness that a sense of happiness emerges: a phoenix rises from the ashes of my soul. For by admitting my faults, I find God. A sense of peace ripples through my being like ripples on a lake.

I end with a quote from the Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes =

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

Emotional flurries amid study angst and home-sickness

It’s a month before Christmas, I’ve just had Thanksgiving, and yet I feel angry and irritable and a little low. I guess it’s probably a range of things, from lack of exercise, to the fact that I have so much work – maybe it’s just that I want to get home; all these Christmas songs are making my heart ache for home.

But a heart filled with joy is no impossible thing, and so I’m striving for that. Hoping to be suffused with the pleasure that comes from learning, expanding my mind and further understanding this miraculous life through the reading and the work I have to do (forgetting the stress and the despair so richly intertwined with fast approaching deadlines).  After all learning about humans and their relationship, perceptions and similarities with wolves is, in my opinion, really quite a rewarding and fascinating topic.

So here’s to perseverance, patience and peace – that pointed towards productiveness, I may avoid procrastination and find pleasure in the purity of honest studying.

I decided to collect three proverbs to present; for people to ponder, and to enrich them in mind and soul.

29/09/2013 - weekend in College Station

I'm writing this from Texas, College Station to be precise, and to be even more accurate sitting on my couch. It's been an overcast day, following the wettest night which was full of lightening. I've been achy all day after spending the day in the woods with Hart Hall Hellraisers Bonfire crew yesterday: pulling out trees up to 6 feet with my bare hands (or should I say BEARR!!) and then the rest having a role in swinging an axe against. That's not to mention hacking a machete through most of the underbrush and then moving the damn trees with the team when they're felled. Exhausting but endorphin-inducing, for an activity of cutting things down it's incredibly edifying.

Today has been a long, tired day. I went to church at St Mary's this morning in College Station town. Disliked how people were chattering through it, disliked the sermon and the smug pastor, disliked the songs which insinuated salvation for all Christians and pity, at best, for everyone else. Instead of grace and contentment I felt filled with an irritation that arose to anger at how proud it all seemed and how the sermon instead of upholding Jesus' teaching of the rich needing to give to the poor, instead talked about giving time to a shelter and giving to a local community; this concluding remark was followed by the collection baskets. The songs were excellently executed with an almost professional orchestra and choir but the moment which really made me feel at peace was during communion. At the moment I'd just made up my mind to not get up and thus to reject the proceedings and my commitment to the symbolism, a song from Taizé = "nothing can ever come between us and the love of God". And with that peace-inducing thought, and my events and thoughts on the last two days recorded I am finished with this blog.