Chemical Soup

It has been nearly a year since the initial post on this page. That day written of was somehow disappointing and seemed to be the culmination of the life I had in Colorado. High expectations and sabotage leading to self-pity and frustration. But that was my choice... my stringent expectations of idealism and the failure to accept change for what it is and adapt to life. A tip of an iceberg, foolishness learned intimately.

Now the fitness level I wrote of is far in the past. I am running only a few days a week and physically my threshold for this type of performance is far diminished. On another front I am much improved today. Spiritually you could call it... but it is really just a derivative of hope. Hope is just a word. But in the faith of this word we find a certain uplifting of the spirit. We can choose cynicism as a blanket but is will keep us cold and isolated.

At the time I was having problems consolidating this dread of the everyday with my underlying knowledge that the world as we see it really is just a decision of which perception to choose as our reality. Surely life is easier when the only thoughts we can conjure are naive and positive. I went through a darkness of my choosing, from mountain top to burning pit and having seen all of this I had trouble placing the negative and positive side by side.

Taoism tackles this issue, accepting both. I never mindfully rejected that all parts of the world are equal. I did have issues with dualism and still have not made up my mind whether dualism is an ideal convenience or a concrete reality. I am leaning away from the hard and fast approach and it seems most everything is a degree of grey. Absolutions are out there as exceptions.

Ultimately I had a choice between negativity and happiness. I decided that since our minds are a chemical soup and any emotion in this sense, could be chalked up to magic of some kind or really just a trick we are playing on ourselves that I could simply choose to trick myself in a more beneficial manner. Instead of drowning myself in the darkness of illusion I could step across that line and peak back into the sunrise and sunset. Perhaps I was not and am not ready for a life of noonday light, but I know I do not choose a life lived at 2am, either.

This has afforded me the ability to freely recognize where I am and to move through the varying degrees of perception. To understand life a little more deeply and when happiness is warming me to not take this for granted as a permanence but as a passing fortune which comes and goes as the sun exposed from behind a passing cloud on a cool, breezy day.

I find myself richer for this experience while not having a penny more. I have expanded in some way and now must begin to learn these new parameters. The explorations will never end but this should not arouse fear and stillness as its result but rather eagerness and calm as we know that these are things preferred to foster and that the one greatness all beings crave is Love.