A New Hope

I have a friend. I am sure many of you can relate.

This friend has a blog, she is self-confident, a self-starter, and successful in most people's definition of the word. I envy her a fair amount, not as much as I like and respect her, but a fair amount nontheless. So in an attempt to jump-start my life into overdrive I have decided to look past the social conventions of a "think twice before you speak" lifestyle and voice my opinion. Too often I have thought twice and committed the far greater sin of not being true to myself.

Truth is a funny thing that way, it can make you and it can break you. So many people want us to be truthful with them. My sister (along with her role-model Dr. House) would say this is false, that people want us to lie to them and just say that this lie is the truth. I want to expect the best in people but I can't help myself occasionally agreeing with them in silence.

I believe we live in a lie, that we have so much invested in maintaining that lie that when the truth begins to tear down the walls of the world we have made we do everything we can to fix it. To get things "back to the way they were." You know what I am talking about, you have said those words along with every other soul on the planet. All of us have wanted things to go back to the way they were, back before they got complicated, back when we were happy, back before everything went wrong.

We get stuck, we feel like we are fumbling around in the dark looking for a replacement lightbulb. We can flip the switch and illuminate our world after a great deal of effort in replacing the bulb, but eventually that bulb will burn out again and we will be back where we started. Trying to regain that single glimpse of the room that surrounds us.

We are slaves. Slaves to our minds, our thoughts, our preconceptions of what life should be. And few people are more manacled than I. I am not saying I have had some epiphany and am choosing to enlighten you, I am saying the weight of my chains is so heavy that I cannot help but notice them.

I look at people I know and I see the lies in their lives. I try and say something, sometimes they hear me, othertimes I might as well be talking to a brick wall, usually I just do more harm than good. I can see how we are tied to our ideas, our notions about what we need to survive, what life is suppossed to be about. But in the end we do know the truth deep in our hearts. We realize that eventually we will run out of replacement bulbs altogether and be forced to move on. To get on with our lives.

Because the truth is, we can never go back.

 -M. Powers