The Way Things Go

11:50 p.m.

Often, I get excited about things.  The excitement is blinding in its quickness and its intensity.  It fades, sooner than I expect it to, every time.
There are others things which I am rarely expressively excited about, but I keep coming back to them over and over because I really do love them.  They stick.

In my excited micro-explosions, I feel as though I know so much; in my quiet, insistent, tenacious love affairs, I tend to feel about as knowledgeable and capable as an infant camel.  Maybe that's okay.  Maybe that's what learning is.

———

12:03 a.m.

Sometimes ignorance and knowledge both feel like sickness.  Sometimes, I'm afraid that people will stop learning about things that are important, and even people who do want to refine themselves with learning and truth and real knowledge will be culturally corralled into having useless fluff stuffed into their brains 90% of the time instead.  Sometimes I'm afraid that people will know too much and the whole world will turn into a Gambit Pileup of everyone trying to pull others' strings, and we'll never know who's going what way.  Sometimes I want to hole up and have no contact with anyone because I'm afraid someone will bleed on me at the wrong angle and it will be the break point that kills the infinitely fragile person lurking inside this thing called myself.

———

12:20 a.m.

Every once in a while, I wonder if I am a good person at all.  Jesus said no one is good except the Father.  But then, I think that Paul said later on (post-Crucifixion/Resurrection/Holy Spirit outpouring, amazing etc.) that the Father sees Jesus when He looks at us, and Jesus was the image of the Father.  But sometimes I wonder if there really is too much darkness in me.  And really—if I can't get rid of it once and for all, why can I not at least channel it?  I could do great things with darkness.  Instead I'm squashed up in some inexistent corner, horribly terrified and horrifically angry and wrenchingly sad and much too apathetic to do anything about anything.  This is dark, and I know it, and for now I will refuse to care, even peripherally understanding that later I will know this isn't me, or not me in my entirety.

———

12:40 a.m.

Tell me, where do existentialism and faith diverge?

———

12:42 a.m.

Be still, and know that I am God.
~
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.

———

12:55 a.m.

Sometimes it takes some good, hard thinking to ready one's mind to listen.  Sometimes, thoughts can be exhausted to emptiness.  Noise might be a gateway to silence, and silence a slippery road to clarity, or to peace, or to something else that we need.  Sometimes, it is desperation and not satisfaction that draws us upwards.