ON FACETS OF THE SELF

we need to learn to anchor our hearts to our bodies, and our minds to our hearts, and our souls to our minds, and our hearts to our souls. we need to tackle problems that are bigger than our selves, because a mind working with another mind increases the chances of gaining some sort of understanding, exponentially. when i feel that whatever anchor in my own self has become caught on the rocks of my being, or when i feel that it has fallen off entirely and dropped to the sea-floor below, i look not back towards some part of my life in which i experienced comfort, for comfort is not there simply because it has passed. instead, i look back, prior to my own life, into the lives of others. into their symphonies, and their novels, and their essays, and their paintings, and their words and their stories. and i look at present outside of my own life. into other eyes, and other hearts, and other stories. tonight, i look to nietzsche. other nights, i look elsewhere. i look to any figure who reminds me that the essence of being human is something bigger than any one individual, and to fully understand the very ingredients of which we are made, we must look outside of ourselves. for evidence of what humanity is can be found within each of us, yet not one of us can entirely sum up any aspect of it on our own. i look to artists and musicians and writers and philosophers and thinkers, of the past and of the present, not to better understand my self but to fill in the blanks of understanding that i cannot find within myself -- understanding of humanity, and of passion and drive and inspiration. my soul is hungry for knowledge and experience and adventure, and even in knowing that this hunger will never be fed completely, i search on: not for a specific person or a specific sentence or a specific chord, but for the infinite slew of things that do nothing but feed the fire of my hunger to seek out more.

one of the pains of consciousness is the inability to discover and uncover everything that is there to be found. but the pain of not attempting to explore the world is an even greater breed of pain. and it is when we find something that makes all corners of our being - heart, mind, body, and soul - come together in some kind of harmony that we feel joy, and the memory of this joy causes us to seek out new discoveries and new worlds existing within other places and other people and other experiences. once one small intellectual or creative discovery has been truly made, the human being will not cease to crave more.

the downfall of innate curiosity and the soul's inclination to roam is the phenomenon of distraction. the self knows the pain of the delay in finding something that sparks something within the self, and it knows the pain of redundancy and regression. it knows the pain of loss, and the pain of things being ephemeral, and the pain of coming to know the exact proportions of the space between individuals; or the exact dimensions of the space existing between intention and output, or thought and expression, or love and portrayal of love, or sadness and tears, or joy and laughter. the fact that we cannot express anything in an entirely pure form is perhaps why some of us, needing so desperately to express the dances that occur within our souls, try so many mediums, and why we destroy our art or take back our words when they realize that they do no justice to what has happened within.

but the fact that we continue to attempt expression is our saving grace. and our failure to do so only encourages our souls to feel, in the hopes that they will feel something that cannot possibly be expressed in any way other than that which is entirely pure and perfect. if we are lucky, our lives will become our opuses, and our finest brush strokes will be that love which is conveyed in the purest and most impossible-to-doubt kind of way.

it is strange to me that the act of being born is, chemically, the act of becoming separated: separated from the mother and father (being parts of them that are removed from them and gain the ability to walk away from them and choose to accept or dismiss them), separated from the earth itself, and separated from others. one day each of us will return to the earth. our job while we are here is to feel, and to experience, and to translate these feelings in ways that are able to touch the souls of others and change them, and to translate these feelings in other ways that may exist beyond the lives of others. if each of us learns to create love, and convey love, and give love, then we will pass it to all of those around us, and to our children. equipped with love, and equipped with their own ability to create love, they will eventually pass a stronger kind of love on, and so on through the generations. we are afraid to do so because doing so, to all whom we know, means setting aside our desire to be separate entities, and doing so means being willing to become a part of everything around us, in ways that we will never know, and to lengths and degrees that we will never fathom.