"What a view."

You ever had those moments when you feel yourself getting too tied up in things and you begin to feel a little shaken, and maybe even uncertain, of your behavior? Or maybe it's just the way you've been living or the things you've been doing that make you feel a bit out of character? Perhaps you've been living a life of distraction that your focus has become skewed?

I need to remind myself that this very life I am living right now is beautiful.




I remember there was a moment just one year ago when my best friend and I were left at school in the late afternoon, waiting for our rides to pick us up. This was typical of us, as we both couldn't drive (and still can't) and we'd spend after-school hours talking, hanging out, and having those 'deep moment' sort of things. We parked our buses on the planter boxes that day, right behind the school (above is a picture of my high school from the front, street view). It was particularly warm, I remember that--like a warm summer breeze. She'd feed me her snacks (I'm such a mooch!) and I'd be there to listen. We were both tired from the 7 or so hours of back-to-back classes drilled down our necks. I remember laying atop the planter box, looking up at the blue sky shining through the green leaves overcast from the planter. Man, what a view. I remember posing the question to her, "Why is it that it's so easy for us to look down?" When I mentioned this, I could feel a philosophical metaphor coming on. "It's so easy for us to look up, but rather we choose to look down to the ground... That could go for a lot of things."

We've had a lot of moments like that in our four years back at Carondelet, and I can't help but still feel that moment so applicable right now.

I hate to make the term grow trite, but Kairos has been the antidote for much of the love, honesty, happiness, and appreciation I've felt and shared throughout my life; and I still strive to make it ring true in all aspects of my life today, as hard as it may get. When you begin to lose yourself with distractions, obligations, activities, and uncertainties, you need a guiding principle to bring you back again--something that serves as a token, key, or testament to that particular clarity. For me, it serves to bring back that faith, that belief, that honesty, and that love.

When you become so wrapped up in your own ideas, it becomes too easy to build upon things. You want to expect more from already good things. You want to see and interpret things in your own subjective way. You wish to have things happen in one way and not another. You begin to want other, different things. You grow tired of what you have. You lose faith in people. You begin to reason against what you have. And you create this sort of illness that breeds hatred towards an internal sense of self.

Bring it all back in. Why can't you just love yourself again? You are so blessed. Rather than worry about what hasn't happened, or strive to be something you're not, or even wish to be somewhere else than here, "Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily, we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves." (Although Aldous Huxley was quite the eccentric man, he's an eccentric man for a reason! That quote is from his hallucinogenic account, found in The Doors of Perception.)

It's not too hard to look up once in a while. Dust the dirt off your feet and get living again. "There's a hell of a good universe next door. Let's go." (That, my friends, is from the dear Mr. E.E. Cummings!)
Life isn't all that bad when you come to accept and fully appreciate everything you have right now. An awareness of that appreciation and being grateful for what I have has allowed me to wholeheartedly love a best friend. With that appreciation, I find that you are able to utilize and make the most of all these moments, opportunities, and people who walk in and out of our lives... Its inevitable life will throw its hard-balls at you to test you, but that's only because we thrive on the drama of existence. "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional." (TY Alexis Luna.) Life is a blessing. Don't clutter yourself. Live a simple living; live for you; live for me; live for others. What good is life--and love--if it isn't shared. Just take a step back right now, and Let's go. Someday, we'll know.
I vow to bring myself back Home. After all, you are a representation of your Home, and your Home is to be shared and brought to other places and different people. Remember what it is that makes me me, and what it is that makes me human. Open your heart again.

Here's a song I would like to end this post with: