Summary of Life

 

SUMMARY OF LIFE

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print an share.

What would I tell anyone?  What would I tell myself?

Life is surreal.  It doesn't have surreal episodes as exceptions.  It is just surreal.

You will spend most of your life trying to belong and to survive.  You will pretty much do whatever society and situation demand to facilitate belonging and surviving.

Of necessity you will erect curtains of explanations to convince yourself you understand and to make sense of it all.  The curtains will be thick and will grow heavier with time in the effort to hide the fact they are woven out of imagination and wishful thinking.

The belonging and connections so desperately sought will exist at the most superficial and fragile level,  but great effort will be irredeemably invested in the effort to maintain these fragile facades so easily rendered to shreds by a trivial disagreement or misunderstanding.

Somewhere and somehow through all this, you, a kernel of conscious experience - information integration - and uninformed choices, will endure.  You will be shaped, and you will do some shaping.  The surreal nature of worldly life will prove to be a malleable matrix of circumstance that seems to chaotically and exasperatingly rage about you, but through it all is providing exactly the opportunities for Choice that will serve your growth…..or not…..that growth part is entirely up to you.

That's it.  That's the realistic graduation ceremony speech you will never hear.  At first it seems a dour and discouraging outlook.  You will find most realistic outlooks are dour and discouraging.

But look a little deeper…..at life, not the silly speech.  There is a freedom in all life’s seeming constraints, your ultimate freedom of Choice of response to those constraints.  There is growth, which is to say the essence and boundless potential of Life.  There is inescapable, if momentarily subsumed, awareness of the imperative of belonging and connection.  There is a capacity offered, which you can accept or reject, to see beauty.  

All in all, the dour and discouraging outlook turns out to be the facade, the deception, the distortion.  This world can afford to be surreal because it is so fleeting.  You on the other hand endure, as does the potential for the belonging and connection that you consciously or unconsciously crave.  Make the inescapable choices along the way.  Shape your nature and being, then discover you are actually slowly revealing your nature and being, an essence eternal, an essence always belonging and that always belonged.  

You will keep trying to belong and survive, as you must.  Along the way let yourself be born, born through the surreal storms, born into what you sought from the beginning.  

This world is surreal.  Love is real.

Copyright 2021 Don Ray.  Feel free to print an share.