Disillusionment

One of modernity’s many juxtapositions is that billions of us carry around devices cataloguing our entire lives and yet we know almost nothing about ourselves.

We share this lack of self-knowledge with our ancestors, who unlike us explored themselves, sacrificing time and “accomplishment” to contemplate their shadows.

If we finally look long enough inside ourselves—as far as we can peer—our hearts and minds will surely give way to disillusionment as it bursts through a passage long barred. We will see ourselves for who we are, far lacking in the most important respects, a woeful try at who should have been.

Alas, are we not all desperately disillusioned? Everything we do is an attempt to forget this and mask it over.

If we endure in this brutal introspection—though we must ask where one can obtain the motivation to begin and, more confounding, endure when the world offers a vast array of effortlessly attainable shimmering objects—the despondency which disillusionment produces leads to still more contemplation.

Eventually, if we persist over long seasons and the lonely expanses where there are no trees, we come to realize that this disillusionment is a shadow of our passion standing upright, an imprecise and unscaled outline of the creature we were meant to be, a suggestion that our life is in fact charged with significance and purpose.

Yet here, just as this realization gives us hope, we encounter a sobering scene. On our left, a pass; on our right, another. Through one—we know not which—come indecipherable screams crawling and clawing all around us. Through the other comes a breeze and silence. Above the passes are inscribed the words: “Among the impossibilities of life — To cause no effect, to be neither good nor evil, and to turn back.”

Should you find this fork of life, the essential truth to remember is that either choice you make will be wrong. The way forth is not choice but prayer.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”

Without God, even noble passions may veer to frightening ends, upstanding men and women to devils.