Category: Personal

I know what depression feels like for me.

It’s a very steep cliff that I jumped off of at a rarely random time.  And I have no idea that I’m plunging at the speed of gravity times my emotional weight until I feel it and look down.  A heavy soul falls fast.

When I hit the bottom and spread over the unforgiving surface, I lay there depending on how much I had to feel.  Recognition of the end of this terminal descent isn’t immediate.  I think that’s why I remain prone for a while.

Nothing picks me off the ground except time.   Thankfully, I always get up.

Even contemplating when time couldn’t heal a wound, I’m relieved to know myself well enough to be too ignorant to recognize it.  I’d just plow forward at the speed of my mass without looking down.

One of my friends from college has struggled to make lasting and meaningful connections with people all her life.  She suffers from loneliness while living out of her car.  She gets passed up for promotions at Wal-Mart, despite having a four year degree and never missing a shift.

Some people get kicked while they’re down and have decades of encumbrances to ensure they never get back up.

For those individuals, Hallmark holidays can put an exclamation mark on what they don’t have.  While the average happy human is flexing their logistical savvy to make Valentine’s Day a perfect experience, others say this:

Just another day, but with more reminders of love all around us, more than usual. Making Valentine’s Day inherently un-usual. And even moreso for those of us who’ve yet to obtain anything even remotely close to love. It rubs it in our faces, like salt to a wound.

Makes us long to feel what love must feel like. A fairytale dream that would be so wonderful, but it never comes true. And just when you think u’re close to obtaining it, your heart gets shattered into a million pieces. As though it’s no big deal, you’ll just get over it. But it is a big deal.

And it just sucks.

I’m glad it’s over.

 

My thoughts on god have led me to believe that he / she / it did in fact give up his / her / its life for humanity, but not the way the Christians and other assorted god-fearers believe it.

As I stated earlier in my sweeping, inclusive statement of faith in the divine intelligence, I have come to believe that god’s will, presence, and energy permeates in all that we perceive and has constructed the framework we call ‘reality’.

The origin of this was the Big Bang, where god, either through sacrifice or an extension of its will, expanded to create our universe and thus gave us life, albeit several billion years later.

I don’t believe it was a gesture of love and I’ll refrain from trying to understand the divine, which by definition is unknowable to humankind.  But I will speculate that this was both a gift and an escape from loneliness.

And further go up my perfect, crystalline walls in this Fortress of Platitudes.

I started a spiritual journey that many do when they’re suffering through loss.  Whether the destination is an absolute or a negotiated middle-ground is irrelevant to me.  I have to believe in something higher than myself in order to get through hard times and this is what I’ve come to believe.

For me, “God” is the divine intelligence.  It is the natural law and order we describe in the laws of physics, math, etc.  Like any divine entity, we cannot fully understand or perceive it, though we know of it.  As with the universe, there is a beginning and an end to it, though it is infinite as it continues to expand.

An inexplicable divinity underlies and underscores everything we observe.

I also believe that “god” or the divine intelligence expresses itself through probability.  Everything you see, confined and explained by science, is a product of probable occurrences, where extremely improbable occurrences are “miracles.”

But the divine intelligence does not intervene in our personal lives except through the random, probable acts of “its” creations.  It is detached as it is all-encompassing.

At least to me.