Landscape of the Heart: There's nothing wrong with me

Despite the way I feel, I am assured by myself and those close to me that there's nothing wrong with me. I am many things, good and bad, and all intersect at normal. This reassurance offers distant comfort.

Well, normal sucks. I know how far from optimistic my life experience has taken me when I recall first reading that life is nasty, brutish and short. At the time, I resolved to continue my positive approach and thereby prove that mighty opinion wrong. Even if my own was the only life experience that contradicted that opinion, that was enough.

Today, the sum total of my experience leads me to know that life is nasty, brutish and short anyway. It's all relative, and no amount of positivism can change the basic fact that life is nasty, brutish and short. Between our unique moments of birth and death, it's how we respond that matters.

So how do I respond? Ruthlessly. Over the past few years, the content of my ruthlessness has changed from optimistic and logical to confused and direct. Both content sets are inherently contradictory.

Contradiction is the pervasive context of my life's content. Every self-improvement achievement, personal enlightenment milestone and lesson learned comes down to the resolution of contradictions. In some other content bundle, contradictions might be resolved one way or the other: If A and B contradict, then A or B is the resolution. In the content bundle that is my life's experience, the resolution is never A or B. Resolution is the integration or intersection of A and B, after noise is factored out and the lowest common denominator of experience is found.

What contradictions have been resolved, and which remain? Each one is worthy of specific attention, and thanks to this public journaling experiment I have started a list. I'll get to them all, just as they all got to me. In the meantime, I'll offer an in-the-moment example.

At this moment, my contradiction is that I am both transmogrifying and stagnant. Unlike the transmogrifier of Calvin and Hobbes fame, my transmogrification process involves no control of outcomes and is not a painless procedure. The procedure requires erosion, corrosion, disintegration and every other form of destruction required to clear the path for construction.

This process has been in spiral play in my life for at least three years. While I recognize the value and purpose of the destruction I have nonetheless resisted every turn of the screw, and with each turn attempted to desist my attempts at control. That, too, is a process. Perhaps this time I have accepted that resistance is futile. Destruction is inevitable, as is construction. Passive does not agree with me, and activitiy creates resistance.

How long to the still silence of the true nadir?