Outside the Box

There's beauty in yearning & longing, and that ache is almost addicting. Perhaps that's why people venture outside their comforts into foreign lands, figuratively and literally. We often find ourselves pushing our limits, attaining that feeling of accomplishment or fulfillment in the new territory. We experience that thrill and the adrenaline rush lasts for a while, till we start thinking. These thoughts and memories come back to us, and we realize we've left a whole different world behind us: a world of comfort and familiarity. These are our dearest friends, and we long for more of them. The funny thing is, as soon as we step one foot back into that space again, we quickly grow tired of them. We suddenly feel the urge to break out again, and experience a new set of boundary-pushing elements. For those of us who don't relate to this at all, maybe we've been sitting in that place for too long as if a person drew out a two by two feet box on the concrete of a parking lot and told us to stay there for an uncertain amount of time. But we're on drugs, because instead of feeling the hard, rocky concrete floor we feel like we're floating on clouds and all we see is pretty, colorful flowers all around us. Sooner or later, the harsh reality will splatter poop in our faces and we wake up from our high to see the obesity of our fear. Our paralysis is rooted not only in the attachment of our comfort, but also our comfort in our fear of potential, consequence; anything. But life goes on. The earth will still spin and the sun will continue to rise and fall. With each day, we find ourselves exactly where we were ten years ago. Yet, with each day, we find every opportunity and any reason to get up and get going; to go through the motions at the very least. But how can we find reason to maintain, to keep going, to sustain some sort of substantial object to lean on. It has to be tangible, or else we immediately collapse if it were mere concepts and ideas that we lean on; we're that shallow. We paint the very picture of what we'd like to see and hear and taste and touch, and we do find it. But we are, at the same time, very aware of the coming disappointment. We try to find that greater force that could potentially push us along outside that chalk-drawn box in the middle of a parking lot, but we know that picture we've painted is too detailed; it's too realistic. So we look at those of us who come in and out of their own boxes, and they are dropping like flies. We go from here to there and everywhere, and find ourselves used up and stretched out. We thrive on the doings, and we're addicted to the yearning, till one day we realize the birds have eaten all the bread crumbs; we can't find our way back home. Somewhere along this melodramatic, depressing diorama we've constructed, we know that a value of a day is far more complex than simply shoving food down our throats, getting some shut-eye, pulling attention out of people, making a name for yourself. The value of a day has far more dimension than we can fully grasp, because we can't see the connection. We can't see the subtle affects, and the invisible marks we leave behind, wherever we go, whether we intended it or not. The value itself does not really come from the actual things we do and say, but from what we make of it. A lot of times, the most simple things are the most profound, not necessarily because it was deliberately woven in, but because we choose to see it through a different pair of eyes. Often times we find our feet stuck in the thickest mud, but we somehow manage to keep moving only because we have our hands to help us. Even when we are plastered in, addicted to a standard or a feeling or a substance or even a person, there's always a little glitch in the matrix. We can lift up our feet even though we're crippled because there's something above and around us that cannot be ignored. Though we're totally alone in that parking lot, we have a sense of presence that resounds in the deepest part of who we are. We cannot ignore it, and we cannot get rid of it because this presence tugs at the purpose of our existence. We find that without God, nothing makes sense.