meta_physical

-austin

I've never felt less like myself.  I feel like I'm in someone else's life and i don't really like what they've done with the place.  I was really worried  this summer that my life wasn't gonna change when everyone else's did and I was gonna be left behind.  Now I just want my old life back.  Actually, I think what i mean is that I want my old self back.  I'm not unhappy with the way things are, I'm just kind of unhappy with the way I've become.  I'll be so grateful when I'm back to normal finally.

I was once so strong.
Now I'm weaker than a baby bird.
I was once so grown up.
Now I am a baby bird, trying to learn to fly again.

Vague.

I'm either stuck in the past or the future.  My mind is never here and now.  I bounce back and forth, looking at the one changes my perceptions on the other.  It kinda sucks.  Maybe I'll elaborate more later.

Please cite and discuss a quotation, phrase, or statement which has had an influence on your life.

“A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.” - Joseph Conrad

Somehow, it just does not do to view life as a race any longer.  Existence is not a marathon.  I cannot press my side to relieve the cramping forever; always hoping the finish line is around the next curve.  My fingers cannot stay under my last rib, throwing me off balance as my free arm and legs push me hard toward the time or place it will all finally end.  Salt and sweat seeping into my squinted eyes.  “Soon it will be over, soon I will reach the end.”  No, this does not do.

Until I was fifteen, I had a skewed vision of life.  I saw each day as a box on the calendar that I could mark with an x once I had struggled through the required suffering.  Living was penance for being human.  Moments of joy were fuel for stretches of endless depression: laughter was merely a stepladder in a chasm. 

But that year something managed to change me.  I found the biggest rejection of my life so that I could find the most amazing feeling of acceptance.  I began to realize I’d been viewing life through a “Christian” lens, without Christ.  I had been neglecting to see that each day I woke with a purpose.  The God of the universe was choosing to hold me together for another day.  I was still breathing each morning not to overcome, but to paint, to create.  The sun illuminated a canvas, not a chasm.  It was not that my life should imitate art, but that my life should become art. 

It was not until some recent months ago that I devoured the quotation above.  Conrad was not simply putting his thoughts on paper and publishing them, he was sending these words to me.  It was no longer enough to think of life becoming art, I had to justify those thoughts in every action, every second my lungs hold breath.