Face the Terrain
You can only walk in one direction at a time.
I try to parent my appendages to the best of my abilities, but the more I allow my fingers to frolic one way and my toes to tap-dance the other, the more likely I am to bust my gut instincts.
It’s a worthy pursuit to embody a multi-faceted sense of being, but not so much when it comes at the cost of a singular purpose. I spread myself too thin, as if the world is one giant piece of toast and I am but one jar of anxious jelly aching to touch crust.
Withdraw, solidify, and coalesce under the pressure of your heaven-sent synapses to emerge radiant, angular, and able to cut through life with precision. It’s the only way through this jungle of subjective judges and triggered-happy ideology.
Sink into story. Your own and others. Lean into and out of yourself. The more you fold yourself inward and cycle your way back out, the more you crystallize your gifts and in turn share more of yourself with the world.
Self-development seems more a process of recycling than rock-climbing.
We use up the best of our abilities and swallow them once again. The cyclical nature of our being will dismantle, reconstruct, and refurbish our instincts into something entirely new. Then we repeat this process until the original skeleton of our spirit no longer resembles its ancient predecessor.
We consume ourselves in an evolving paradox, swallowing our shadows and spitting out bones made of revelatory light. Over and over we feast on our ignorance and with the remains, slowly construct a world that makes sense.
Yet, every tower will topple, every pile of misused marrow ground into dust and into paste and into the cement which forms the base of our next heralded monolith. It should be seen only as the inevitable consequence of our minds making a grab at the next rung on our evolutionary ladder, not simply our burnt-out sheepy habit of seeking a shepherd for our herd of runaway ideas.
So, pick a direction and stomp through it with true boots. There are skeletons at the crossroads of people debating the best of all worlds. They each used the scaffolding of the one before as a boney bench for their dire considerations, and they too become nothing but an uncomfortable heap of hesitations.
The wind carries their shallow breath and mumbled excuses, yet you pay no mind. Your eyes are fixed, as they should be, on the distant glimmer of gemstones in the eyes of your future reflection, your bejeweled reward for a trail well-traversed. With this in mind, you shrink into yourself. You remain present and humble.
You tighten your laces and face the terrain.
One step at a time.
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