Running in place

I think there was a point this week in which I threw my hands up in the air, letting go of all my careful schedules and plans, and just started running in place to try and keep up with all the things raining down around me. Think about that image. Does it make sense to you?

But there is a point in which you are not really moving forward, but sort of – stationary – yet expending more energy than if you were flying down the road towards a destination. Sometimes, the final sprint towards the finish line of something leaves you in the exact same place. It is in recognizing when you shouldn’t move, but should be infinitely more engaged in the present that the greatest leaps of accomplishment occur. Sometimes.

When it is over, you are just sort of trying to catch your breath while you look around at all the things that have fallen off your shoulder, or out of the sky where they have been hanging over your head, and although you have not moved – you have lost burdens that will now let you walk the final mile with ease.

This has been a week of wonder and disappointment. In all aspects of social things, more masques have slipped out of place to reveal what lies beneath. Some of the faces have been hideous, and others have shone with an unexpected beauty. Within that revelation lies the source of direction that comes next.

When we get a chance to see the person beneath, what we come to know is not the person that they hid, but we get to learn the extent of what we seek. Have we sought the company of people who are not what they seem? But what they seem promises an effortless acceptance or answer? Have we avoided the company of those who are different from us, who may speak another language whether literally or experientially, that unmasqued reveal our same longing for value, beauty, peace and love?

Troy Davis was executed and the process revealed both the beautiful and the damned within the world. And it showed us how close we all are to losing our humanity because it would be so easy to not try, to expend the energy, to not struggle against things we both no are wrong and realize we may not be able to change in our lifetime.

Yet to stop struggling, to stop trying to correct what is wrong is to give up on all life but most importantly, to give up on our own. When we say that anyone’s life is not worth an unrewarded effort, we say that our own life is not worth effort as well. In that lies the greatest sin, of giving up on life.

Life is not always beautiful or fair. It is not always just or kind. Yet the beauty of life is that it is beautiful, fair, just and kind. To cease demanding that it become a place of wonder and peace for every life is to give up on its potential to balance the worst with the best. To sit and passively wait for the balance is to remove its possibility.

All shall be well,

I say that often but now I understand the missing part of that phrase.

All shall be well because all is not well and that shows me the areas that most need love and action.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.