Questioned


Dear Eugene,

When does a person become an adult, begin to come to terms with her own humanity and say to herself, Hey, this is starting to make some sense to me now or Hey, this doesn't make any sense at all and I can no longer brush it off?

I think it is when he starts to question himself, the ways that were prescribed to him since day one and worked well enough for him to withhold his questioning until now.

Until now.

And what happened just now could be a drastic change of fate, or a quietly coalescing desperation finally making to the surface.

Or whatever.

Life becomes too much.  Life becomes too little.  Life needs to be questioned.

My life.  Within the context of all lives.

In that sense, growing up in a religion can be a real handicap.  One needs to declare loyalty before she knows what being loyal is about.  One needs to assume the prescribed way is right before it's proven wrong.  Or one needs to rebel against it by default, out of necessity, in the name of open-mindedness.

But the mind is and was and has already and always been open.  We can embrace the given Self or fight against her to death, but it's always the givenness of the Self we are enlisting to do our bidding.  We are not and shall never be a blank piece of paper.

How convenient it is for one to believe he has stumbled into truth, to have happened to born into the right family, the correct tradition, and be given the proper strings to tie everything and everyone up into a bundle of good conscience and respectable lifestyle for the Self to give an account of an answerable presence?

How inconvenient it is for one to believe the truth is always out there, somewhere, but never here, that to subscribe to a given way is a de facto moral failure, irrespective of the truthfulness of the prescription itself, that it is always embarrassing to Amen what your mommy Amens, and the water that once and continues to nurture us is necessarily backwater?

I was dreaming about Nietzsche and I think I know what pained him.  You take a quote of his from the internet, as we often do nowadays, and post it out of context on social media, as we almost always do when talking about this thinker or that, and you have yourself a miserable, godless megalomaniac.  "God is dead!" he said.  Or so we thought we heard.  Frankly I would rather talk to him about his dead God than to listen to some religious people speaking about their living one.

Life is too much.  Life is too little.  Life needs to be questioned.

Yours, Alex

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