Even as a little kid, I could never just follow the scripted path. I had to go rouge. Outside the lines, at all times.
So once adulthood arrived, and most of my peers got down to the business of investing time into the system to build themselves up with financial accreditation for a future based around a career goal like our Boomer guidance counselors and parents told us to do, I sought a different path.
I needed knowledge. Like I needed air. I thought university was the place for this, so I started attending classes. Not for any particular degree, but for the lessons in each particular class. Once I had milked the place dry of any class left that interested me, I tried a few that only half interested me- and dropped out fast enough to get my money back.
The education system’s delivery of knowledge to people, or more specifically- me, is crap. It’s all backwards, and it’s all designed in the way it is distributed to enforce a type of intellectual obedience that ultimately stifles actual thought. The point was never just laid out and unpacked- it was always gate kept in a weird unspoken way. Instead we’re fed a slow trickle of no-context data, expected somehow to memorize it that way, and only once everything has been “added” to our programmed minds do we get around to what the point could be. By then, I had always lost interest in playing the game, and without an anchor of interest committing any rote data to memory was a non-starter for me.
So I started doing my own reading. Stuff from all corners. I took jobs in various fields, and moved around the country. I met people from all walks of life. I got to know some of them, deeply. I reflected on those I did. I reflected on myself. I tested the limits of systems. I participated in raw creation in any and all opportunity for it. I opened my heart to people- to the world entire, in fact- and let them all tear it to shreds. And through every rejection, every heartbreak, every death of a loved one, every season of grief and despair- I crawled out the other side, wiser, new, and ready to do it all over again.
All for the priceless knowledge that came with it. It’s only now, looking back, that I realize what repeat destruction I visited upon my own soul in its pursuit. I pursued it the way Ahab pursued the whale, with much the same ends.
For now that all questions had have been answered, and all the secrets of the universe that my feeble human mind was capable of grasping firmly has been thus seized, I feel now an emptiness.
An emptiness where an appetite used to be, where a person aught to have been the whole time.
The world, I fear, is a cold and horrifying and Godless place, of which we are spared only fleetingly by moments of grace and privilege. It is this sad awareness that lives in the center of my heart like an ice cube.
Anyone I meet with hope, or with a dream- a child, or anyone who is yet a child at heart- their hope and their dreams, in life and the things that mean something to them, and mean something deeply- even and especially the silly, whimsical things- becomes a person I NEED to protect, at all costs.
Life is fragile, but hope and dreams even more so. I will feed off the hopes and dreams and warm vibes of others- but without draining them of any of it. Instead, I will pour any and all of my resources into propping them up. Supporting them with time and effort and just straight up cash money if need be.
Just to keep that alive in others, which I cannot keep alive in myself.
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