“Life is too short for this,” a saying we hear quite frequently.
Our time here on earth is too short to wake up every morning regretting our lives heretofore.
The ideal is to try to resolve regrets as they appear- before they become an overwhelming mountain
that requires more strength and effort than we may possess to climb. Oft times this does occur, making the necessity for seeking help from others whom we may discern as having more strength and wisdom with which to aid us in scaling that mountain. We should never be ashamed, afraid or too proud in our own self knowledge to seek and accept this aid from our fellows- nor too foolish to take advantage of an offered chance for success.
To some degree we will love the people we encounter in life. The measuring scale of this love is vast and far-reaching- encompassing the range to the lowest bottom of antipathy or dislike to hatred- and soaring to the heights of complete adoration to ecstasy. Most human love settles somewhere in between.
As we metaphorically climb the slippery slopes of the mountain of life on earth, we create niches in which to plant or feet in order to lift ourselves upward toward the summit. The tickets to life’s lottery, if you will, are the niches of communication, love, hope, faith and trust, which may be found within each human wallet.
Some of these niches will hold us as we climb- some will crumble and give way resulting in our sliding backward down the slope. Seeking further safety and success, we have the additional requirement of ropes that are secured within the bedrock of our societies.
These ropes are the legal contracts we make, which are secured by the bedrock of our society’s laws; while the niches we create are the promises we make secured only by the faulty whims of human caprice, which are subject to collapse with a change in the weather of life.
On the slippery slopes of our marriage contracts we require both- as we try to buy with the ropes of our laws what should be had for free with promise.
Most of our relationships in life involve simply hand and foot niche climbing, without the security of embedded ropes; so we climb these shifty faltering slopes by winging it on empyreal human promises of love, fidelity, protection and caring. With hope and trust, we soldier on, carried by our faith in fickle capricious human nature- because we must.
But, and there is always a but-this faith cannot be blind. We should not be unaware of the shifting sands of this nature, and in self protection realize the real possibility of our failure- keeping by, as it were, a saved strength and fortitude to be used in the probable event of a new beginning up the slopes.
So we climb upward and onward in forced instinct- though sometimes bloodied and exhausted, testing the niches we find and make- trusting the ones which seem most likely to hold us, and discarding the ones that didn’t- not waste valuable time crying over the niches that failed but focusing on the building of new ones for the future, which may be stronger from our experience in building by trial and error.
Somehow we know, in that place where we all know things, that everything that happens to us and everyone else- has a reason and a purpose- as each niche we find or create; perhaps we created the weak one that fell in order to learn to create the next one stronger.
We must love the niches that hold us; and forget the ones that didn’t. No one told us that scaling this lottery mountain would be easy, or pleasant…..If we continue to climb upward toward self-fulfillment we may just make it to that summit; if we sit down and give up until the sun goes down, we’re sure to lose what we may have won.
No comments:
Post a Comment