Spiritually speaking, Geoff is a sight, but not the sort of sight you’d want to ordinarily write home about. In this way he fits right in with the crowd at a barbeque. Quietly spoken and without much to say other than one or two pieces of small talk, he’s inwardly challenged and struggles for even a modicum of happiness. Life hasn’t quite seemed to work out for him. Sure, he puts on the front, but what most people don’t see is Geoff’s a miserable person deep down.
Most people don’t even notice this sort of thing in the ‘Geoffs’ of this world—they’re frankly more interested in themselves, and why wouldn’t they be? Yet, everyone to some extent seems to struggle for peace and happiness.
I’m constantly dismayed at the sight of young and older people alike who are walking dead people—ridden with fear, as manifest to the testimony of their faces—the outward subdued matt-finish anti-glow of people half alive. It’s the demeanour they wear that sets them apart, and that, in the worst way.
Life was never meant to be like this. The only way out for these people, it seems, is to belligerently throw off the shackles of the old life in order to breathe in a new transcendent existence, full of portions of courage to jettison the past and embrace the unknown future.
This can only ever be a process. Nothing truly good ever happens overnight. It is a process of re-training the mind in response to the truth held in the heart; to go beyond the known into the vast, voluminous—even scary—unknown in search of the holy grail of true personhood.
We’ve all had I suspect, portions of gross sadness and sorrow to contend with. We’re blessed in every move to repel the trappings of this hellish reality, but without denying its existence and impact over us. The impact and the stimulus to change is the celebratory reality, for without need for change we’d be left totally uninspired.
This is resilience personified—to approach and augment change. To break past the things that would otherwise hold us, responding eventually in habit.
And, it’s like this. Change at the personal level, over any circumstance that threatens to crush us—we crush it in our momentary acceptance of its reality but not over its ability to hold us down permanently. And we’ll not be moved in this.
Nothing in our world can really hold us back; only ourselves. When we dare to realise this, we find this is indeed the truth.
© S. J. Wickham, 2009.
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