SHALLOW GRAVE OF HUMANITY

I am getting to the place in my life where it just seems as if the rest is all uphill. I am almost to the mid-life point. I am left to wonder if it is all just shit, or can one person make a difference. I don’t know how I came into this world. I don’t know how I lasted. And I don’t know when I am going to leave. But I have contemplated the chances I have taken and the circumstances I have lived with that I should have been snuffed out. I never died, and that leaves me to wonder how significant my life will be. In my faith, I know that my purpose in life has not been fulfilled yet. I feel as if I was spared from major disease, although I have definitely put myself at risk. And I was spared from death, although there have been times that I should surely have died.

What makes it most difficult for me is that I don’t just get through life, I analyze it to death. I worry, I agonize, I look optimistically in some aspects of the future, and pessimistically in others. I don’t have a clue what the future holds. There is no certainty in life. Even death is uncertain to me. I don’t know what else I can trust in besides my faith. That has been the only thing that has given me strength when I was weak. Faith has been the only thing that has made a dismal outlook seem somewhat tolerable. And it is that faith that gives me hope that somewhere in time, when all else is hopeless, there will be something that will bring me to the next day.

What I would like to see, is a happier day. I have had the fortune of experiencing real joy for brief moments. And life isn’t always one big party. I know that. But what I don’t know is why. I wish I could not let things get to me. Why was I so cursed with this raging mind that just never seems to stop thinking about things? I think about how I can make a difference. I think about what people think, and how they react, what makes them feel, do they feel. I think about how to change people’s attitudes and how to help them adapt to a healthier or more loving attitude. There seems to be so much hatred in the world. There seems to me that some evil is penetrating to the very individual souls, which like an infection, spreads to other souls. It hurts me to see the spread of hatred, but it is almost universal and so is a quest to be better than the other person. It seems that power, money, material gain, toys, outweigh peace, joy, solitude, character, and integrity.

When I think about what I can do, I think it’s a hopeless situation. And it frustrates me that I can try and try and try. And at best, my efforts are noble. But they are seen as naïve. I may be naïve, but I am so far from unintelligent. I get it. I don’t want to sometimes. Because when people take for granted the lightness I try to give, it hurts more than anything. When my confidence in someone is built on faith, and then broken on a lie, at a whim, it hurts. I make attempts at drawing out of people the sensitivity, and the compassion, and the character that I know is there. Some don’t see it in themselves because they were not given that from birth and instead, the compassion I show is seen not as strength of character but as a weakness or a character flaw. In their sense of building a wall, a defense mechanism, they build themselves up and reason that it is better off at the top. Instead, humanity is spiraling into a shallow grave.