Your Mission
Your mission - if you choose to accept it - is one that has eluded philosophers, scientists, doctors, soldiers, lawyers, sculptors, accountants, painters, and politicians in every nation on Earth for millennia. You are completely unqualified for the task ahead. Will you accept it anyway?
Your mission? To know your own heart. It sounds simple, almost trite, but do not underestimate the hardship you will encounter should you choose to accept. Your heart has been betrayed before: definitely by others and likely by your own self as well. You have fear and worries that are so justifiable the Supreme Court couldn’t overrule them. You have wounds so deep those creepy fish with the lightbulbs hanging over their faces and three rows of teeth wouldn’t dare swim down that far. You have love so contorted that the lead Cirque du Soleil acrobats at the prime of their careers would shiver if asked to even mimic the labyrinthine shapes. You have hope more hidden than the lost canals of Venice that gondoliers speculate about during their espresso breaks because if it existed, you would have found it by now, right?
Overwhelmed? You should be. Out of your wits? Sounds about right.
You have no reason to believe you can handle this. In fact, believing you can handle this would make you uniquely unqualified to handle this. You must learn to know what you know, but you do not know what you know or how to learn it. You will not know until you do; at which point, you will not be sure which action led you to know. For God, does not know why there is light; yet, God created light.
You are careful with glass because it breaks. You are light on ice because you will fall. You are guarded amongst strangers because they will attack. In this way, you learn because you know to learn. Knowing and learning are inextricably linked. One will lead the way to the other, but one will not lead the other.
If I’m talking in terms too abstract, it is because I myself do not know my own heart nor have I seen that knowledge in another. I have read books, but I have not witnessed knowledge. I imagine that this mission has been attained, but the process is not easily observed. We have a culture of preachers and parishioners, which doesn’t lend itself well to knowing learners.
The one in touch with nature does not write a book manufactured from the destruction of trees. The one in love does not sing in recycled metaphors. The one who sees the world does not take a single photograph.
To write for another is to sacrifice writing for literature. To cook for another is to sacrifice cooking for the meal. To love for another is to sacrifice loving for company. We lose the action of writing, cooking, loving for literature, meals, and the company of others. Then, we demand literature, meals, and the company of others to fulfill us. We distill our creativity, ingenuity, and depression into simplicity only to except simplicity to lead us back to complexity.
You may want completeness, but you do not need completeness. Completeness would not do you any favors even it it were accessible to you in this type of mission. Be an incomplete, unsatisfied, depressive. Let others reveal themselves to be incomplete, unsatisfied, depressives or let them leave unharmed. Not all accept this mission. Should you choose to accept, know that you will often walk in solitude as the preachers and parishioners are unlikely to prefer parks to forests.