The world...off kilter...

Hello dear reader! I hope that all one of you is happily noshing away on something tasty and sighing in contentment at the goodness...

Lately it seems as if the world is completely off kilter, off its rocker, out of its orbit. The things that I thought that I knew, the things that were a constant in my world have warped beyond recognition or been cut off in brutal and painful ways.

While this seems like a post about the awfulness of it all, it really isn't.

It's more about how I thought I knew things.

I suppose when I chose to be on a path, and I really committed to it, I didn't expect it to be difficult. Does that sound arrogant?

I suppose that I have always been so decidely sure that whatever I wanted to do, I could do, that to have something that I decided on doing throw a steaming pile of crap in my face and challenge me not to lose my ever-loving mind, seems incomprehensible to me.

Why would the universe do that? Was it really necessary?

Perhaps even the act of asking the question why is arrogant of me...perhaps it isn't my place to ask why; it is only my place to observe the sting of the crap in my eye and the way that it slides down my face and then notice the next thing that happens...

But here are a few things that I just can't wrap my brain around...

1. Why didn't I let go? Really? What was it that made me hang on so hard? It felt like my fingers were on the edge of a cliff and the bad guy stomped on them, and instead of this being like a Hollywood movie where I magically recover all my strength or the hero comes to get me, I fell. And fell. And fell some more. The blessing that came with this fall was that I had a friend who grabbed my arm on the way down, and much like a Hollywood hero, saved me from certain death. But let me tell you, my arm? Ripped right out of its socket and I may never be able to pitch a softball again.

2. When I accepted that there was suffering, and that we created more suffering by the attempted avoidance thereof, I somehow (again, arrogantly) thought that it would help to ease the suffering that I saw around me. Yeah, no. As it turns out, the best thing that I can do is to hold a hand or smile and laugh or just sit quietly. But it keeps coming. It never stops. I want so badly to end the suffering of the people that I love, and the more that I try, the more that the universe smacks me down and reminds me that I can't. I don't understand that at all. Or maybe I do, and I am just rebelling against the idea that the selfless attempt at the giving of cessation of the suffering of others is something that the universe just can't hang with. Fuck that. Seriously.

3. Why am I given the ability to be patient in one moment and then have it burned away in the next? Like solar flares in a no ozone atmosphere, my patience crisps right out of me. WTF.

In all of this, I mean not to complain or say that things are so bad, because they're not. I have friends who love me and who let me love them in return, a place to sleep, a job to go to, enough to eat, and even if I didn't have those things, I would still have all the possibilities in the world surrounding me. There are times when it seems so clear. Like the valley on a windy winter day. Maybe I just need to let go when the wind stops blowing and the smog moves back in. Maybe I can't even hold on to the picture of the lovely day...perhaps that is how the world comes back to its center.