obligatory 02
So it is the 23rd of December. There are three cards underneath the Christmas tree. Today I watched The Christmas Carol, with Patrick Stewart (Read: Professor Xavier, X-men) ... it was very nice. My father kept complaining that Scrooge was bald, but hey - if you go bald early, and you're too miserly to buy a wig, you might as well stay bald.
In short, Merry Christmas.
obligatory 01.
I hope I blog more often. The days string together, and I lose sight of what I've done. I want to hold onto little pieces of nostalgia collected, and how can I do that when my present is never documented?
I have been trying to figure out the mechanics and motivation behind apathy. That seems rather paradoxical, considering apathy essentially means no motivation. I appear to be suffering from some form of that, actually.
At any rate, I have come to the conclusion that apathy is essentially pride and slothfulness. Pride keeps us from admitting we are wrong, and slothfulness says it's not worth it because it's too much work to make the effort to
care.
Apathy has crept into my prayer life in the form of lack of belief. Jesus once talked to a father who wanted so much for his son to get better; Jesus asked the father if he believed. The father answered, "I do believe, but help my unbelief."
How often do we believe and yet not admit our unbelief? Yesterday I found that I was unable to pray because
I did not want to. (Prayer should never be an intrusion into our days, really.) I found myself making excuses like
"What would my prayer do? I don't have enough faith for anything to happen."What I was thinking shocked me. Had I slid that far back into apathy and unbelief? It seemed so simple to just dismiss it, but I knew there was a definite reason. I haven't prayed very much in the last few months. I accept all responsibility for that. And I do want to change that, but I can't when I don't believe.
I felt as though God was asking me if I believed that my prayers would change anything.
(I've always had that love/hate relationship with faith. On one end, "blind faith" sometimes turns me off. I'm an intellectual, not an emotional person. Blind faith implies hope for the impossible; a senseless yearning grasp for something God will never do. On the other end, God works through the impossible, and does every day. Is my faith that small that I can't believe for something God can do?)
-Paradox
a thousand lights
I sit on my couch, staring beyond my luminous screen and into the dimly lit living room. The Christmas tree is colourfully illuminated; pink, orange, red, green, white, yellow, and silver melting together.
The Christmas season is inexplicably rushed. Many elements of Christmas push me towards depression. So many people, social events, problems, presents, money, boxes, cards, paper.
I am a victim of my own intellect. I am afraid of emotionalism because it is an enemy of my mind. I let myself drift away into the nothingness of enjoying now, putting my thoughts in the forefront and my heart somewhere between my head and my keyboard. When I think of hope, I think of an understanding - a compromise between the cynical thoughts and the optimistic heart. It is a blur, carried by the frantic search for meaning ... perpetuated by the silent pauses between dashes towards nothingness. There may be miracles, but they are more often than not emotional reactions and psychological hide-and-seek games. There may be a glimmer of something that finally shines inside a massive darkness, but never long enough to make an impression.
Sitting in the glow of a barely lit Christmas tree, I can see what true hope might be.
There is more to the Christmas season than the empty bittersweet box of thoughts and memories the world would offer. The darkness is made lighter by the recognition that this fatalism I so often lose myself to is not forever. Somewhere beyond the silent blurry glow of a thousand lights is love, hope, joy, forever.
(I do not know what prompts my sudden need to be real. I often hide behind my words, knowing what sounds good, but I do not often cut past all of the verbal barrage that so often comes from my mind. Each word may come smoothly, but this does not mean the emotions come smoothly as well. I fight to feel the emotions that drain from my heart each day. I love the tragic because only in the tragedy is there a choice between light and dark, tearing the grey from the colour palette. I live in the black and white, the stark, the love/hate/good/evil contrast. And suddenly this contrast leaves me with the raw, quivering, visceral mass of self and hope and love. A beautiful idea wreathed in glorified flesh can only be uncloaked by tearing away the glory and leaving only a naked, frightened self. Anyone can choose the words to string together/onward, but only some are willing to strip the words they use of the flowery/powdered/hidden element.)
(I want to be as genuine as I can be. Real, uncloaked, habitually stripping my words to the ultimate minimum. If I can say something in less words, I should. Minimal, small. Leaving only a thousand lights in my wake, each bearing little more than knowledge I passed.)
