Okay, I know there is no such thing as an eight day week. I'm moving into a new week with little commentary having been provided by me over last week's theme of uncertainty. One could say I was so uncertain that I wasn't even sure what to write. The truth, though, is that I gave little consideration to the theme of uncertainty because I was so certain of the validity of my suffering and all I suffered over.
One evening during the past week, I was sure that I am the most isolated, secluded, misunderstood, forgotten, and left behind man on the face of the earth - and that evening I was in a crowd and with company. Another day, I was certain there was nothing in me worth loving because of all the mistakes I'd made in the past. By the same token, I was also convinced in other moments that, based on the evidence of how others treated me, no one can love me with the depth of love I am capable of giving them because no one else in the world is as willing as I am to sacrifice his or her will to something higher.
All the while, I was confident that my life has been a wasted one - devoid of experience, love, compassion, patience, and peace.
And yet there were more subtle forms of certainty also at work in me: To counter the above examples (and the many other instances) of certainty to which I clung, there arose a multitude of thoughts and plans of action I must make and take to live life more fully, to show greater love and patience, to escape from the hellish captivity of my pain. I was also certain that the just reward for the life I'd lived is this excruciating suffering over my past. These last two certainties never presented themselves explicitly as considerations about which I should be sure. Rather, my trust in the other certainties over which I ached made these two states of mind appear to be wise guides sent from heaven to lead me out of this hell.
That incessant mental activity came to a head yesterday when something in me cracked and then burst wide open. Something vile and bitter spilled forth from the hole, and the cracking, bursting, and spilling may have been the most agonizing experience I have ever had. I laid in my bed after awakening from sleep to yet another day in which I felt so oppressed by darkness that I could scarcely breathe. My mind ran through all the certainties of misery in my life. In the midst of that spinning confinement of my thinking, some strange understanding that was at first darkened and slanted by guilt slammed into me like a sledge hammer to the chest: all the specific circumstances and relationships over which I then found myself miserable came to the point at which they were because of the very certainty I had once had over what to do about those troubling moments within those circumstances and relationships. The emptiness and futility of this contradiction drove me as near to madness as I have ever come: on the one hand, I saw just how sure I was I must act or be a certain way in response to this or that difficulty I had encountered in my past, while on the other hand I saw how certain I am now that I must suffer doubt and guilt over those actions about which I was once so certain were right.
My body convulsed. I flung myself out of bed, thrashing and writhing on the floor, slamming into walls, flinging anything I could lay my hands on, screaming myself voiceless, crying myself empty. Never has my mind, body, and heart broken so violently as in that instant of being shown just how far my certainty about the kind of man I am, about the qualities of character I have, about the kind of life I value and have worked myself weary to make for myself...just how far all these certainties about who I am and what God and this life are all about...just how far all this confidence in my conclusions had led me astray from reality.
Afterward, I lay in a collapsed heap on the floor, utterly hopeless and devoid of any will or reason to go on living. I begged God to take me - not with words or with a hope of crossing over to some painless place, but with a quiet and still emptiness in the face of the hopelessness of all my knowing that also lay in crumbles on the floor with me. If there is nothing of which I can know or be certain that does not lead to certain suffering and despair, then there is no reason to go on because all of life is this trap.
I spent the rest of the day - when I finally pulled my body off the floor - moving and breathing. At times, the uselessness of those two functions of form sought to overcome me; at others, there was no me to overcome and I did my duties lightly, without any hope of completion or fulfillment through them. Even the identity of loneliness I have experienced over the past 6 weeks felt more and more distant with each manifestation of itself in my thinking.
I awoke this morning with a disturbance in my chest. It was much less intense than yesterday's. But each time the mind sought to give form to, and thus feed, that disturbance, I was so uncertain of the truth of the images presented to me, that the reasons for, and afterward the pressure of, the disturbance soon vanished.
Was that breaking apart on the floor of my room yesterday a bleeding out of the certainty in me? Was the violent fit the bodily manifestation of Love wresting certainty's control from my body? Does certain darkness lead to uncertain Love? I don't know. At this moment, I prefer not knowing because an uncertain mind seems to relinquish more easily the certainty of its pain.
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