Thirsty and Waiting In the Punchline

Over the course of my life the wisdom of age has started to replace the knowledge of youth. Discovery and experience has slowly overtaken the type of certainty that only inexperience could have afforded me.

I came to realize that certainty, the kind that many of those over me had shown as theirs, was something they would cling to in order to convince me of the black and white of so many subjects, that it was a luxury reserved for the blissfully ignorant. As distance from the back and white (for anyone who was actually looking) revealed itself as so much grey that I was not longer certain that many things could be broadly generalized in order to be compartmentalized into one of two boxes. I could no longer believe that life could or should be lived as such.

This was the start of the breakdown, when a stone became broken to expose a  flesh heart.

The world goes on as it will, and so do we then, and the once seemingly endless resources of time and energy began to reveal themselves as very finite indeed.

Over the course of a few ocassions I was, as all people are, forced to come to grips with my mortality, realizing as the end of the endless seemed to be closing in, so did the vision of my own end as well.

But there is a greater comfort and freedom in that realization if you can approach it fearlessly, and I came to conclude that resistance to certain things is an exercise in futility. Especially as I dared to delve into a deeper and more honest introspection.

As I do still, I did then, I lack a perception and understanding of most people, what they do and why they do it and of the world as a whole. So, this sort self examination was forced upon me from a very early age as a survival mechanism of sorts and in my hope of fixing whatever it was that seemed to be very, very broken inside of me. Because most people, even those closest to me didn't (and still don't often times) understand those things in me.

As I grew, I began to realize that the whole world was as much, and even more so than I, a very broken thing and that was the issue at the crux of the problem.

As this became ever clearer, I found, many if my insecurities evolving into self confidence and that the courage to fight relentlessly was renewed, as those thinhs which should be fought for and against became exposed as something much larger and very different than I thought they were in youth.

Those weaknesses and insecurities instilled in me from the very earliest parts of my life that I saw as making me weak and vulnerable I spared no effort to keep hidden, and protected, because I saw them only as weapons that might be used against me.

Weapons are weapons... the intent of their master dictates their aim and the level of marksmanship, how likely it finds it.

All of this mortality, experience,  observation and introspection was oddly enough the very means by which I finally began the process of learning to master them, so that they are becoming the greatest weapons in my arsenal... I could not ever have guessed this would be the case, but it is.

I once had a guy tell me to take a snap shot of time and remember it, so that when I became thirty I could look back and see how every black and white certainty I had then had become more like varying shades of grey.

He was right.

Now, if you had told me all of this 20 years ago, I suppose I would have smiled and nodded. I would have politely taken it all in and if you asked, tell you that I understood, truly believing that I did.

In looking back now however, there's no way that I could, at least not like this.

Some answers can be given and will suffice, but the most important of life's answers should be discovered if they are to be understood, appreciated, and applied.

In short, I would sum it all up like this...

Knowledge may give us all the right  answers, but wisdom will give us all the right questions.

d(-_-)b
Solo Cristo Salva