you can only lay in bed so long before you realize that the nap you took when you got home from work isn't going to allow you to get any sleep any time soon. i was supposed to be in acworth at 10:00 in case they didn't need anne at work tonight, but instead i slept through the tv i set to wake me up, and decided to get up in the middle of the night to meet her when she gets off in the morning.
so i do what i do when i can't sleep: write half of a sad song, look through some photoblogs, and see what old friends are up to on facebook. caroline had updated her quotes (which i rarely read) but out of divine providence i noticed a quote by c.s. lewis:
Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature & art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas, if you simply tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. This principle runs through life from top to bottom. Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.all night i've been thinking about how selfish and lazy i am. how concerned i am with how i'm perceived at work. how i worry about the wealthy people who live all around and whose kids i teach. how i let silly fears and anxieties cripple me from doing little things i need to do in work and life.
i used to think that as a creative person i had to create suffering for myself. i like the depressing intellectual movies and the hemingway novels. that greasy character who smoked cigarettes in scuffed up shoes was always cool. now i just long for a simple life. struggle will always be there. that's life. i yearn for structure and consistency -- a healthy and productive lifestyle. i don't know what that's like, but i want to be there. to be at a place in life where i don't care how i'm perceived because people see the real me and they love me for it. it's a place where i'm not trying to impress anyone, but i'm just living, being. i go to work, i do my job to the best of my ability, i don't let petty drama stir me up. this is the place where i quote ecclesiastes and remind myself that everything is vanity, a chasing of the wind.
funny, in the sun also rises, hemingway quotes ecclesiastes and that's where he got the title.
good word man. That Lewis character knew how to break it down didn't he?
ReplyDeleteSometimes scholars talk about a collective consciousness that humanity has that encorporates all the truly important knowledge we have gleaned over the years. From my perspective, it's bunk, for wouldn't our collective conscious tell us by now to just be who we were created to be?
ReplyDeleteAnd look at how many times we must relearn the same lessons thoughout life...
There is something in this whole consult your elders thing. They may not know how to work an iPod, but some of them have learned the truly important lessons in life.