A prayer

I am lost at sea again -

the tide that once cradled my head

and rocked me, gently, into quiet lulls

now seizes me impetuously,

now fills me with a sleeping dread –

an eerie timber I once knew well

forces the current into a swell

that storms into the serene abode

in which my silent longings dwell

How long? How long, before

I shut my eyes; the final door,

and the shadows that loomed overhead

descend, those thick and heavy lids,

to snuff the flame, burning soft and dim

as its gentle light is torn away –

or would I have then learnt to pray?

On texture and weight pt.2

When one is alone enough, one finally begins, again, to write. At the end of a dry and wordless spell lies the feeling of returning home after a long trip, being able to converse freely in one's native tongue - no longer having to take the same care with which one handles fragile tableware at someone else's dinner party in handling the most basic of expressions.

But speaking in a second language offers a kind of defense, that excuses ambiguity, convolution and other such obscuring elements of speech. A lowering of the listener's expectations that enables one to say: "Yes, well, perhaps I am not being entirely clear...but if you only understood my dialect,  I could paint it all so beautifully - as an artist in his element - and surely, then, you would understand."

How often one feels as a foreigner in another country like a locked chest of antiques - commonplace items, carried into another culture as the most exotic and mysterious of treasures. And again, as children - how we invent secret codes to encrypt our most private and hidden thoughts; we scrawl them across our diaries in invisible ink. How we mourn the great tragedy of translation - because that which cannot be translated is of the highest value, locked away in the vault of another language for safekeeping.

And we are all multi-lingualists in this sense - each of us operates in a multiverse of symbols; each set of meanings a language of its own. A language of thought, of emotion, and then of behaviour. A language of religion, of culture, of place. And we guard, with all our different modes of being, a single one that is no longer a collection of descriptors, but that described.

Grids upon grids, as Foucault describes, placed one atop the other over history, to provide us with new ways of knowing - and describing truth. Organising the world, delineating its boundaries and demarcations - yet it seems now, there is more to be known than ever before. I love thinking of the idea of the universe continually expanding through time and space, as if mockingly, ridiculing our attempts to contain it.

For now we see in a mirror dimly - awaiting what? The gathering of reflections into their very object, the subject itself. Symbols come boldly into their meanings. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us... when the shifting shadows that herald an oncoming light are finally dispersed, scattered into the wind, when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away... when meaning arrives in the full force of its substance, rising through fissures to the surface in a tide - submerging description, language, forms in its course - sweeping over all things, and finally to carve, across the flat and formless ground, the shoreline of eternity.

On texture and weight, pt. 1

Do you feel it between your fingers?

The exquisiteness of life, stretched out before us in ripples, in an endless cascade of creases and folds, tumbling, one into the next. Life's abounding… is-ness as they say, for the lack of a more elegant expression. How dimensional it is; not in a physical sense, but in the variety of ways by which it can be measured, considered.

We live a textured existence. Bradbury writes, in Fahrenheit 451:

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.

Life is details, whether captured in words, colours, or lines. Detail upon detail, wonder upon wonder. If a stage, how elaborate the production! How expansive each set, how intricate every act. A needless display, some might even call it indulgent. But somehow -

There is so much, there is not enough, there is so little 

Kundera's singular phrase "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" captures, in one breath, this absurdity: The immense weight of the human experience in all its intensity (the pleasure, the pain) rests entirely on the fragile scaffolding of a scant existence.

How does anything hold?

On essentials

In these past few weeks, my train of thought has been tossed mercilessly between tracks by each new reading, conversation, encounter; veering off its initial course into novel terrain.

It began with the notion of inherency, and a consequent paradox - by which extrinsic measure do people use to ascertain intrinsic value? How have we come to hold belief in the intrinsic value of life (human or otherwise) - a concept so strange, so contrary to what the natural laws of survival dictate? To think, if something as basic as one's right to existence rests on one's individual 'fitness', we could hardly proffer the argument that life in all its forms - weak and strong, sick and well, young and old - is inherently worth preserving.

And next, an onslaught of anthropological concepts that brought the discussion into the realm of universals. Is what is intrinsic, intrinsic to all? Do all human cultures abide by the same basic rules (-assuming the universality of an internal system that guides individual behaviour)?  How do we free ourselves from the very biases that enable us to gather with our senses some symbolic understanding of the world around us? Impossible as an attempt to rid thought of language. 

First, despair. Realising one's necessary partiality, a handicap inextricable from our very nature - an inability to take things at face value, to see things for what they are. Second, hope. Relief at the inconsequentiality of our efforts to understand everything, believing that omniscience lies boundless, wide and deep and far beyond the most foreign of borders.

***

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note.

I cannot be sure what the author's (Sartre) intent was, but only of what it impressed upon me - that there is a superfluousness to life that detracts from what we feel to be essential - precious, pure and true. We pore through thick layers of styrofoam and bubble wrap, before finally arriving at the tiny weight, transparent as gold, encased within.

***

And again, it arose: the need to shed
To strip the skin of culture off its seed, each shred
To lay life bare, fresh, bruised and plain
To devour it whole: flesh and pulp,
kernel, shell and grain.

On reductionism

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the subChristian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.   

C.S. Lewis (1944). Is Theology Poetry?

On knowing and truth, pt. 2

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky remarks of our instinctive - and violent - aversion towards pure (scientific) objectivity:

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point... I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?

One of my favourite bits from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey goes:

“It was the worst of all in class, though,” she said with decision. “That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head – and I could not get it out – that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping – and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge – when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway – is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly.” 

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Because truth, in its purest form, offends us. Its specificity startles us; it harbours an extreme devotion to itself - a degree of particularity unrivalled in all of nature. How can we know it? Surely in the face of such exceeding singularity we would cease to be individuals; we would be consumed whole, what would be left of us to call our own?

How narrow a way it seems from a distance! But if we dared approach it perhaps we would catch a glimpse of the broad expanse of path that lies just beyond its gate, stretching far and wide and deep into an infinite horizon (made up of many lines, all forming just one).

On knowing and truth, pt. 1

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I
 lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 - Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

Two things, or maybe three. How fragile our minds - how fragile our world, in which we experience only through our minds. How limited. How incapable of reaching that great height, from which we can know anything to be true - except through faith of some sort. A leap. A knowing beyond knowing.

And can even the truest skeptic live without belief in the possibility that there are things worth knowing that have yet to be known?

***

Started thinking deeper into the concept of objectivity upon encountering R.D. Laing's The Divided Selfn. Laing writes:

In contrast to the reputable 'objective' or 'scientific', we have the disreputable 'subjective', 'intuitive' or worst of all, 'mystical' It is interesting, for example that one frequently encounters 'merely' before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being 'merely' objective. 

The first definition of subjectivity I came across online was this:

existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought.

But what, then, isn't subjective? If it is only through our mind that we perceive anything at all. If our very existence is a purely subjective one, if subjectivity is not a crutch but the crux of all experience - how can we lay claim to any form, shape or type of objectivity?

Again, Laing writes:

We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.

And I cannot help but think: Perhaps one day we will really come to believe we know all the answers, all the explanations, all for the reasons for everything, and I will be able to explain everything away - to science, to reason, to the laws that govern nature - but then, who and what will be left in all the universe, to explain me? 

***

Because now, what does it mean to know anything? It seems that to lay claim to knowledge one has to either admit ignorance, or be found guilty of it.

But what about things that can be assessed objectively? Studied, measured, calculated, deduced. In the grand court of Reason, is everything false until proven true?

If you were to make the claim that objective knowledge - quantifiable knowledge - is the only knowledge worth knowing, what evidence would you call up to the stand? Even if one could acquire the dimensions of the universe or a formula to predict every possible trajectory of the human mind an objective case would not be made.

Maybe we all have a little more faith than we realise.

On wordlessness

"A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dragon Princess

As I wrestle now with words, straining inwards to reach adequate expression, in my native tongue, for these foreign symbols - I think now of all the thoughts in the world left latent, laid in crevices beneath the surface (as unformed as man first lay in the ground), of all the beautiful and brilliant sentiments that have only ever had substance in the mind of one; substance charged with a vigour that was never reciprocated by any other - no language, no form of agency, no outlet.

And thus contained, unexpressed, suppressed by the weight of their own immensity, made void, lost forever to a collective invisible consciousness - they created something else entirely; that which haunts - and yet, escapes - us: the inexplicable.

It collapses like a candle, folding into itself in the same way 

a starving man would eat himself alive 

and nothing would be accomplished.

- "Fragile", 14 June 2012

On narratives

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
- C.S. Lewis

It's the anxiety of loose ends, the chaos of possibility in a universe with no beginning or end. Each wayward thread poses a threat, waiting to unravel that timeless tapestry that stretches as long and wide as human history, as high as human ambition. Every generation past has stitched itself in, securing its place in time and space. But where are we?

***

Nouwen notes that this generation is marked by a sense of historical dislocation - "a break in the sense of connection, which men have long felt with the vital and nourishing symbol of their cultural tradition; symbols revolving around family, idea systems, religion and the life-cycle in general."He writes:

Crucial for those who live in the modern age is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. We find ourselves part of a non-history in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For modern-age people life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In this dislocated state we become paralysed. Our reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of human existence, but apathy and boredom. Only when we feel ourselves responsible for the future can we have hope or despair; but when we think of ourselves as the passive victims of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy, our motivation falters, and we start drifting from one moment to the next, making life a long row of random chained incidents and accidents.

Barring any notion of spirituality, John Berger makes an observation of "the world today" in his latest collection of writings:

Any sense of History, linking past and future, has been marginalised, if not eliminated. And so, people are suffering a sense of Historic loneliness. The French refer to those who are forced to live in the street as S.D.F. Sans Domicile Fixe. We are under a constant pressure to feel that we may have become the S. D. F. of History. There are no longer any acknowledge occasions for us to receive the dead and the unborn. There is each day's life, yet what surrounds it is a void. A void in which millions of us are today alone. And such solitude can transform Death into a companion.

***

Perhaps the root of our disillusionment is that we no longer subscribe to the concept of narrative. The idea of an underlying connection; a single thread that runs through a sequence of seemingly disparate events in our lives. The idea that we can find in real life the same elements we discover in literature - symbols, themes, motifs, the elements that bind, so artfully, every character and setting together into a coherent, continuous whole.

As long as there have been human beings, there have been stories - myths, legends, folktales - passed along from one generation to the next. People have always told stories because people are stories; all the moments in our lives are indisputably connected by one unifying fact - they happened to us.

A thought crosses my mind every once in a while - that sometimes we live our lives as if we have lived life a thousand times over. I think of it as a Many Lives Hypothesis - it posits that the connectedness of the world today has provided each of us access to more people - and insight into more lives - than ever before, and that this knowledge has dulled our sense of expectation towards what our own life holds for us.

Because what is the point of expecting anything from the future when it seems that every outcome has been exhausted, every trajectory anticipated? When someone is always one step ahead in the game, whatever you choose to play at; when what happens next is inevitable, predictable but above all, inexplicable... an order, yes - but without sense or logic; try as you may, there is no algorithm to be found.

And the what if no longer inspires us - each possibility only reminds us of the million other possibilities we could, or will miss (or have already missed) out on. The quote from that Jonathan Safran Foer book  - “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.” 

But when did we begin to forget that in the midst of so very many lives - lives past, lives present, lives that will be, could be, should be - each of us only has one - our own? And there is so much that remains unlived. It's a wonder wonder enough to last a lifetime.

***

A little while back I found myself asking a ten-year-old this: "If you could be any age in the world, what would it be?"

She thought for a moment, then told me quite curtly that she thinks there is no point in wanting to be any another age, because "then people would end up missing out the age they really were".

On the tube

It is in these in-between spaces - on the Tube, browsing supermarket aisles, idling in line - that I feel most like I'm really living. When time seems superfluous - I do nothing, accomplish nothing, yet time is being spent - lavished - on nothing at all. As if it would never run out; as if each second we were really counting down to eternity instead of an end.

***

Walking the streets of London as the sun looms ahead, in clear sky, above the brick-laid, metal-framed horizon; it shines pure, bright, unobscured - upon meeting its glare, one is dazzled -

the pavement crowds are transformed, resembling the shadow cast by a shoal of fish in murky-green seawater that betray their presence; a collective mass lying just beneath the water's surface, in wait only of oncoming danger - the other shadow.

***

I sometimes wonder that in determined, measured - conscious - effort to attain authentic expression, we may interchange authenticity and accuracy. And that fear returns: When the meaning, the moment, passes, what does else does it leave behind but empty shells, littered phrases?

The either or

Collige virgo rosas (TBC)

How do we make the most of our states? Of the experiences we do not choose, that simply happen to us; transient phases that are and then are not, as quickly as they came to be.

We grasp at life - its fragile sinews snap within our grip, crushed by the weight of our longing; we enclose it, nurture it -it withers, smothered by an airtight, irreproachable caution. We shred it with precision; we dilute it, vying for transparency, with our expressions. But in our efforts to preserve life, to store it up within us, we begin to grow stale from the inside.

***

So what then do we do with ourselves? Whatever it is that we cannot yet understand, I think -

Distill it down; use a sieve, a filter, a flame; try making concrete what is abstract, permanent what is ephemeral, still what is in passing; the feelings that slip into our unconscious before they have taken form - they slide one into the other, shuffling, stirring, continually creating something new, brushing every fiber of our being in their ascent to the surface of our minds (or is it better to say that they descend upon us?)

Because who ever knows how long anything will last? If we will ever again feel meaning prick at our fingertips, so close within reach. If we will ever see the world with such clarity, such intensity, as it is - a spectacle, a wonder, a horror (Every angel is terrifying - Rilke). It is frightening, to think of how much we lose in the process of growing up, the wages of time we mistaken as a deposit. And as time takes its toll on us we endure, awaiting a return - but does it arrive?

I ramble. The ramblings of a young girl who has no claim to knowledge and little to experience. This quote strikes me:

"'I love,' said Susan, 'and I hate."... Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate" - Virginia Woolf, The Waves

***

... is now the time for searching -
to store up, to be still -   

the pale period of hibernation before 

the creature emerges out of its cave 

into a bright new world that blinds 

and dazzles it with complexities

painfully wound around every experience,

inspiring the intensity that presses the pen

into paper and impresses meaning onto material -

before life?

but no, there is always a need -

for who knows when wonder will dry up and

leave the soil of the heart barren with indifference

and the gentle light by which infant eyes 

see the world is torn away by time, in its great envy

of youth, and they begin to adapt to the darkness?

- "Necessity", 17 November 2012

On boredom

I stood waiting, soaking in time. I tried to imagine person in a place and circumstance for whom freedom was simply to be unoccupied, idle. And all of a sudden, boredom became the wildest luxury - unimaginable. How is it that we have become so disengaged from living that life itself, the very air in our lungs, escapes us and creates in us such vacancy?

There has to be

 "Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she really was." 
- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Somewhere there is a world full of forgotten and unrealised selves, full of children and dreamers and artists; a world full of the life we have lost here on earth.

On space and freedom pt.1

It's been over a month since the last post but within that gap I'm back in London, settled in a new place and we're now nearly three weeks into school. And it's now past that time in the night beyond which one can't hope to accomplish anything very useful.

This post has been too long in the making - it's still a work-in-progress but there is nothing more restless than a thought left incomplete.

***

What comes to mind when you think about freedom?

I think of space. Boundless space. Unadulterated space. And in the middle of that vast expanse a little girl spins wildly, recklessly yet - with arms outstretched - she appears poised in an effortless balance. She staggers about as she turns, but never stumbles; creating incongruent circles in her course. There is space, there will always be enough space, she thinks to herself - not once does she worry about spinning off the edge, there are no such bounds. And in each and every moment before she halts  - pure elation.

But we live in a world of edges.

On the plane of our existence, there are edges on all sides. There is never enough space. Spin too fast, or with too much vigour, and you find yourself on an edge. The very act distorts your spatial perception, disrupts your sense of balance - an impractical pastime, too dangerous to be undertaken perched upon such a precarious precipice.

Often we spin anyway, tasting the air with our skin; our limbs swing loosely, collapsing softly against the wind. And we feel absolutely, utterly free. But then - an edge. And all of a sudden, gravity seizes us and we are captive, bound, at its mercy. The mirage dissolves into the desert sand, the thirst returns. It was an illusory freedom after all.

Toward the close of the novel Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, the narrator Antoine, along his spiral into existential angst, sputters:

Is this what freedom is?... I am free: I haven’t a single reason for living left, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can’t imagine any more… I am alone in this white street lined with gardens. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

What is freedom, really?

Etymologically,

Old English frēo (adjective), frēon (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch vrij and German frei, from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to love’, shared by friend.

Freedom finds her root in Love; to love is to free.

To love someone is to give him the space to be. To express himself, to act in - and sometimes out - of character. The space to make mistakes. To grow. To explore.

To be loved - truly, wholly, absolutely - then, is to have true, whole and absolute freedom. There is room for joy, and room for error. Breathing space. Allowance. And in all of this, there is a safety - a knowing, deep beyond doubt, that you are loved not for what you are in there here-and-now, but in the always-to-be.

Freedom is not obtained through solitary pursuit, but a relation.

Rilke, in Letters To A Young Poet, implores to his addressee, Kappus:

... believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

An insurance, an assurance. A guarantee.

Freedom is found in this - a portrait of life framed in the knowledge of perfect love. Because perfect love casts out fear. 

On being a self pt. 2

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
    enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

2. Identity

At a retreat in UK sometime last year, a speaker shared his journey to faith. He recounted the moment it began - lying awake at night in his university dorm room, he realised how inconceivably terrifying it was to think that no one in the world could see inside of him, apart from himself. How unbearably alone he felt. An unspeakable heaviness.

And that story really resonated with me. The thought of how very lonely it is to be a self, in a world of seven billion other selves. An infinite deck of cards thrown up into the air, tossed by the wind - and descending, each one on its own course. No two the same.

Somewhere deep to our defences, lying dormant, is a longing to be known as we truly are. But what is the "self" in us that needs knowing? Where does "I" end and where does "not I" begin? Pascal muses:

 What is the self? A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her. And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory, do they love me? me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing my self. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what makes up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person's soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore we never love anyone, but only qualities.

Somehow, we know that who we are goes above and beyond our qualities, i.e. our personality. That you are more than the sum of your affect, behaviour and cognition. More than anything that could ever be phrased in words, envisioned in art, re-enacted through interpretive dance.

That no matter how tightly you embrace someone, you could never engulf a person whole, crawl into his skin, see through his eyes, think with his mind - as much as you understand them, you could never truly understand what it is like to be them. And even if you could, would you still remain you? (A scenario now more plausible than ever before apparently, according to this article.)

Questions. What is identity? How do I identify myself - or rather, what do I identify myself by? What makes me - anyone - matter, in either sense of the word? Do we matter? Should we matter? Are we made to matter? We know so little of what, who we are.

I wish I understood more. But all remains uncertain to me save the knowledge that there is a core to all things. An apple. The Earth. Existence. And that all questions are satisfied and searchings stilled every moment my eyes lift, and I find my self held secure, suspended within a sunbeam-gaze of perfect love. An object knows its purpose only through the eyes of its Creator. For now I see in a mirror dimly, but then -

The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

Even as I have been fully known.

On being a self pt. I

“It is my growing conviction that my life belongs to others just as much as it belongs to myself and that what is experienced as most unique often proves to be most solidly embedded in the common condition of being human.” - Henri Nouwen

I remember waking up on the morning of my twenty-first birthday with one thought:

I am glad I exist.

It had not occurred to me before, with a tone of such sonority, that it was a wonder to be anything at all, let alone a self - to have a name, face, a place in the world. That each of us is not something, but someone. No matter how small we ever come to feel, we remain irreducibly, relentlessly human.

So what does it mean to be a self? Every notion of the self eventually ends in paradox. A duality. On one hand, distance and isolation; on the other, intimacy and connectedness. The impetus for every relationship arising from the tension between the two.

This train of thought led me to two separate, but not disparate concepts regarding the self which are frequently conflated - Individuality and Identity.

1. Individuality 

I have always been fascinated by the psychology underlying individual differences. Temperaments, traits and types; enneagrams, assessments, inventories.

Personality tests appear to operate on a principle akin to that of the classification of music across genres. Pop. Punk rock. Electronic. Blues. Sure, the divisions may be arbitrary and often misplaced - but not reductive in the least. Rather, they capture in their stride the diversity of different styles, laying them out across a spectrum, visible and plain.

I think it's the same way with people - while our present knowledge of human personality is far from exhaustive, "categorising" people can often provide a framework through which we can appreciate the nuances of human behaviour and tendencies. Instead of diminishing individuality, it deepens it. Even the beauty in Art stems from a representation of chaos, organised into a form in which it can be presented, studied and perhaps even understood.

But is introspection a well? Do our attempts to know ourselves help us any further along our road towards a purposeful, well-lived life? Henri Nouwen writes:

Self-affirmation and self-emptying are not opposites because no man can give away what he does not have. No one can give himself in love when he is not aware of himself. Nobody can come to intimacy without having found his identity.

In searching inwardly, we narrow our gaze. One must do so in probing depths. But the limits of self-awareness lie in the strange metaphysical notion that who we are - who we really are - has nothing very much to do with us at all.

As the first line of Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life reads: It's not about you. And if that is true, we have to look much further, higher, beyond ourselves for answers. 

On faith

"Faith is therefore no aesthetic emotion, but something far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence." - Søren Kierkegaard

Inspired by a quote of his, I attempted Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling a while back. Flailing in my struggle with a philosophical discourse beyond my depth, there was one particular notion of faith I found within grasp.

Expressing what he termed the "paradox of faith" in analogy, Kiekergaard writes:

It is said that the dancer's hardest task is to leap straight into a definite position, so that not for a second does he have to catch at the position but stands there in it in the leap itself. Perhaps no dancer can do it - but that knight [of faith] does it. The mass of humans live disheartened lives of earthly sorrow and joy, these are the sitters-out who will not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers too and they have elevation... But when they come down they cannot assume the position straightaway, they waver an instant and the wavering shows they are nevertheless strangers in the world... But to be able to land in just that way, and in the same second to look as though one was up and walking, to transform the leap in life to a gait, to express the sublime in the pedestrian absolutely - that is something only the knight of faith can do -

It took many readings and re-readings afterwards but this description really spoke to me. I love it because in a single picture it captures the tension of living the everyday in light of eternity.

According to Kierkegaard, Faith is the concentration of our heart, soul, mind, strength into a single, precise movement in which simultaneously assume two postures at once - to be wholly not of the world, but to live wholly in it. Fully detached but fully engaged. Finding in the finite pearls of infinite value. Counting all as loss, but all for Him as gain. Etc.

It all sounds right somehow - in the way that some of life's deepest truths are formed from paradox - but it's still pretty abstract stuff to me. What does a life of Faith really look like?

I often wonder if religion is a retreat from reality; simple solace for real-life sorrow, ready relief from real-life pain. But more and more I'm being taught that belief is not a balm for suffering, or even an explanation. Instead of removing suffering, it enters into it and fill it with meaning - because He chose to enter into it and fill it with meaning.

"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden" - the weightier the purpose, the lighter the load. It's been said that our deepest fear isn't of pain itself, but of empty pain - without sense and without purpose. As Nietzsche put it, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how".

Overall, a reminder that a life of Faith is not one of resignation, but resolve. Not being afraid to join in the dance.