about that place/state of being

There is a place.
a place we all may one day reach, where the hurt is so constant that you are inured, immune to the power of it. this place is a settling of the spirit I like to term"Meh."

Meh is not a place to be dignified with the term limbo. it is not some place of balance and expectation. it is a place of negligent torment and wasted feeling. it is...meh

it is a place to which we are consigned, but make no mistake - we are consigned to it by virtue of our choice. we choose to accept the treatment meted out to us that ensures our spot in Meh' purgatory.

why?
it is the easiest thing to abandon the world of Meh, to break free and banish the heart fractures of expectations and promises, to not live in the realm of hope in the face of sustained disappointment.

but we will not.

that one time out of a thousand is just behind the next meh episode. that one time that makes it worth it, that makes you for even a minute feel the warmth of affection and desire...

may your moment not be of steadily diminishing returns.

meanwhile, you have the meh for company.

Musings

Boris Vallejo's "Prometheus"

There is a titan who it was said, was eternally damned for his daring to bring fire to the world of man. He was berated and punished by his equals for giving the gift of progress,  of warmth, of LIGHT to a dark cold and forbidding world. While the mortals who before him knew only cold and darkness praised him, he hung physically on the altar of his peers disdain and alienation for his compassion. This tale takes shape every time we as a Caribbean people are gifted with a luminary who also has a soul.

You would think we would learn to love and share freely; that resentment and divisiveness serve no one; that the only prestige worth having is the peace of mind that acknowledging and loving your fellow man brings...but no.

We live, aggrandising our efforts, deigning to  consider the work of those less than our opinion of ourselves as worthwhile - worse yet on par in importance as ours. We create colonies of exclusion,  we seek out superiority.

We have put ego above community.

We have put self above family.

We have put pride before service

And, fools that we are, we believe that we all each are immune to these - even judging others for their levels of self indulgence.

Who have we become? Who have some of us always been?

What qualifies us to cast nets of negativity and dissent? From what pedestal of righteous indignation do we feel justified in causing division and discord? 

We live in an age where information and wisdom are mistaken for each other;  an age where same wisdom can no longer be counted in years lived,  and authority a construct to be questioned and daily revised under the scrutiny it has needed for evolution.  This is a glorious time to be alive, a fantastic time and opportunity to bridge the gap.

But we are not bridging the gap. We are creating walls of transparent titanium metres thick, and digging trenches of separation miles wide and deep.

And it is a problem that will destroy us.

The aging cling to the legacies and advancements of the present, happy to receive the work of the young, and jealously guarding their birthright in their unwillingness to risk irrelevance. 

The young, now no longer constrained to wait for this (in their mind) unnecessarily rigorous baton passing, have already lost mass interest in their heritage.

And why wouldn't they? So many other cultures are there for the choosing - and all readily available and packaged to look like everything they ever desired.

There is much to reckon for, and you on your various mounts Olympus are sadly first to blame.

There have been too few Prometheans and far too many incensed gods.

You cannot hold welcome and inclusion into community as tools for manipulation when to survive you need their presence and interest. You curse yourself to the bitterest of damnatio memoriae - and the world is poorer for it.

The young...oh that I could lay all the ills at the feet of those charged to tend us; to blame the society that failed to make us confident of her embrace. But I cannot. We have allowed the privilege of birth to become shadowed by the spirit of entitlement. We seek belonging through demands, ourselves needing to be handled carefully.

And so we create, not a subculture,  but remove ourselves from the well of inherited and inherent to sip from the meagre canteen of self. 

We have struck valiantly out on our own, to commit the sins errors and evils that generations before should have inoculated us against but were too busy carving themselves into the now, marginally concerned for the tomorrow that they know they will not be part of.

And it is STUPID.

And it hurts us

But you do not truly care

And to the few that do, they are shamed before they can turn the lens of your petty self absorption on you.

No one is free from Sin,  but the stones have been cast in blind fury so wide that the village is in ruins. And now, I finally see why hermits are content by their streams of solitude.

It is said God is dead, and that we killed him. Community's soul lies bleeding out,  and, but for the odd gasp and grimace fading out in the shamefully 'indignifiable' death to which we have consigned it.

And....I am tired

Tired of false "we," people containing themselves into an invisible multitude, invoking narcissism too great for one body.

Tired of empty empathy that fails to even be sympathy

Tired of underhanded schemes and barefaced manipulation when the honesty of admission of a sense of disconnect would solve the loneliness.

EGO,  that ruins the "we" only when it is given full autonomy over not only the self but the selves of others... an interpersonal colonisation of toxic result.

And we make it hard to love us

So very hard

And yet we demand it. That which we won't selflessly give for fear of being in a position of vulnerability. How foolish! 

Even this letter and it's hubris in supposing it will change anything hurts.

But it can't not exist. 

And I can't stop believing in a world where Prometheus is all of us, and so celebrated is the act of freely sharing and loving that it is impossible to consider the warmth as not eternal. Maybe I will awake to the reality that my hope is not a fantasy. 

Til then, the queue for a slab altar and the removal of regenerative livers is thinning...and not because love granted the foolish Pardon ego and selfishness demanded.

Sin Cera,

Carl Anthony Hines