I'm just kinda happy right now, and i don't know why. I've been thinking about the days back in Kenmore east when Heather, Joe, Adam, Trina, Josh, Vicky, Dave, Bridget, and Mike would hang out after school and just chill wherever our rumps rested. I know there were more that would join us, but i can't remember some names, and these are the main ten (including myself) that would regularly hang out. Anyway, i miss the people who where there, and i miss those times, and untill recently i couldn't figure out why.
We're told by our elders that we need to always remember Highschool and enjoy it while it lasts because it's the best time of our lives. I think that's a crock of shit.
I had a revelation recently. It was few weeks ago while i was walking my friend Jackie's son Joey around the block at where i used to live in Tonawanda. That's in New York for any who don't know or didn't grow up with me. Anyway, what i realized is why, for most people, Highschool was the best time of their lives, and it's kinda sad. It is all about community. In highschool we had a community. If you were a jock, you had football, or soccer, or whatever sport you played and your teamates made up a community for you. If you were into art or theatre, there were clubs and plays and shows to go to. For some, community was just sitting around wherever we wouldn't get kicked by the joggers or yelled at by faculty. But no matter how you looked at it, and no matter where you looked, people were connected and loved on each other.
Skip ahead about five years. Highschool is over, college is probably done with as well. You're out "Making it on your own". You're so stuck in american individualism that you haven't talked to the people that you loved so much and with all your heart in years and for some reason the american dream isn't looking as bright and shiny as it once did. The only person that you care about now is yourself and maybe you're boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife. wow.
I am a christian. I don't hide behind it, and I don't hide it behind me. I believe that there's two things that we need (besides food, water, and air) and that is God, and people. There's a popular christian saying that there is a God shaped hole in our souls and only he can fill it, although most of us try to fill it with other things like people, money, drugs, etc. I think that is true. God made us to be in a relationship with him, but that's the topic of another blog.
I think that there is another hole in our souls as well, and that's a person shaped hole. Sometimes we take people and put them into the God part of our soul, but they will eventually fail us in that way. But what people are ment for is that all vital community. We weren't made for just to commune with god but each other. We need people, and lots of them, to laugh with , to cry with, to help with our problems, and to help them with theirs. We play, we fight, we love we loose, but we need people just as much as we need anything else in the world.
Don Miller is a local Portland author. He paints this picture of hell: An astronaught is flying through space with a suit that can recycle all his waste and keep him alive forever with air and nutrients. There is a malfunction in his ship, and it explodes sending the man into orbit around the earth, still alive and able to be so until he dies naturally, but no one can come to his help. Days, weeks, and months pass, his hair grows, his mind plays tricks on him, and he starts going in sane from the lack of contact with other humans. Years pass and eventually everything goes dark because his hair is everywhere and he can't open his helmet to get it out of his eyes, so now all he has is the voices in his head and nothing else. Nothing.
Scares the crap out of me.
I love you all. Even if i don't know you, i probably love you. I leave you with this:
May you love, and may you have community, so that you may be whole and live a live that is even better than the life that you remembered that you once had.
~SMAK
No comments:
Post a Comment