Life is a mixture. Things we like and want to feel more and closer to us, and things we don’t like, that we don’t want to feel at all. And we, we are caught between them.
It hurts us. What hurts us? We are looking for answers, but the truth is that we don’t know either. You don’t have to know what hurts you to feel that it hurts.
If we were to look at a painting, we might think «How beautiful, I would like to be part of the painting». It’s the same with our lives. As in a painting, the elements fit together, and create a pleasant overall image.
Some experiences and feelings we go through are downright unpleasant, painful. Other experiences are simply unfair, and we will often feel that forces stronger than us are tilting us.
It is not at all easy to live. And this is not a cry for pity or lamentation, but realism combined with some empathy and understanding. Some things really are common to all people. For example, such a common thing is that life will test our hearts and things will happen in everyone’s life that we will not agree with in any way, but which we will still have to go through.
Science is beautiful. Because it is based on linear formulas, on verifiable facts. Once a formula has been found and tested, it remains the same forever. You have discovered a fundamental law and soon it will not change.
But life is not science. Life, this thing that we experience, that we live every day and we didn’t give a damn because it is a much, much wilder, chaotic and unpredictable animal. Life cannot be reduced to an equation. Living is not simply a formula or a recipe. It can’t be.
We have been on this Earth for thousands of years. And yet we are so young: ….30 years, 50 years, 75 years…. And do we think we are mature? Of course, we would like to be. But not enough time has passed since our birth so that we are one step away from our crazy childhood. Even the most mature of us is just a child. But in our pride we don’t realize that we haven’t lived enough on Earth, as humans, to be wise enough, to have matured.
We still have a long way to go before we understand divine justice. We shout loudly and sue, or we passionately accuse dear people over and over again, just to bring some human justice down from the sky. And the surprise……. Nothing happens!
Everything seems like a tough battle, sometimes. There are moments when we wish that everything would stop, that we would no longer need so much commotion, so much battle just to live. Why can’t it be easy? Why can’t it simply flow smoothly like the water of an evil that quietly follows its course?
In the kaleidoscope of life, in its palette of colors, there must necessarily be room both for the things we find agreeable and for those that displease us. We don’t like it, but life doesn’t care. We are just one species out of millions of species, which, being endowed with reason, we have come to believe that we are entitled to have everything we want, and we have come to claim that life respects our rules.
And although there are things that I also find unfair, I’m not sorry that life shows me, on an individual level, that it wouldn’t hurt me to sometimes be made to sit in a civilized way to learn where I belong in the grand scheme of life and to stop thinking that everything I don’t like has no place in my life.
Humility is what gives us the right to be proud. I am not anti-pride, but I think that a pride that is not doubled by an authentic humility is arrogant. We are not the center of the universe and life does not revolve around us.
We forget to bow our heads in amazement before a greater force, beyond our understanding, a force of which we are a part, but which is not limited to us.
Life can be a battle. But when you can see that the battle itself is no longer a meaningless one, but a meaningful one, then maybe you understand where you are going.
And when your cup is filled with meaning, then your heart will be able to smile even when it cries. It will be able to find meaning even in the most unfair situations.
Life is not fair in the sense in which we humans understand justice. This does not mean that it does not make sense and that it does not deserve to be treated with a dose of wonder. True sadness of the soul is not having hard days, when unfair things happen to you.
The real sadness that I see is when even on normal days, when nothing out of the ordinary happens, we are not able to look at life with amazed eyes, as if we were surrounded by a field where everything is sacred.
We are here. But we forgot to see it. And then how can our souls enjoy something that cannot be perceived as being beyond vision?
Smile from the heart! (if you can). And be kind to the light of the world and the light within other people.