The constant dilemma: is it dangerous to wish? Is it dangerous to hope? It is human to hope, and yet, the experience of wanting something so badly that your insides turn upside-down and allowing yourself to hope (against hope) that such beauty will enter your life – only to have your dreams held just out of reach, never to materialize – is deeply painful and crushing to the soul.
Is it a matter of desiring wrongly? Of wanting and hoping for the wrong things? Or is it just that the world is broken, and even if you are hoping for the most beautiful and true of things, you’re not guaranteed the outcome you so long for – not in this lifetime, at least – because the messiness of life intervenes?
Who’s to say, definitively, once and for all, what is true? I struggle relentlessly with the sorting-out process: the separating of reality from fiction, of truth from untruth. I feel I am on slippery ground most of the time. Contradictory information abounds, and my mind short-circuits in its attempt to unify this great variety of inputs, trying and failing to find the truth in two opposing things.
And yet – reality is complex. For me, there are different levels of reality to contend with. There is the immediate, physical, rational, observable reality – easy enough to apprehend and generally agreed on by most people who have their senses intact. But then there is another reality – less immediate, perhaps – or at least having a less straightforward relationship to time. It is often invisible and gleaned through intuition, flashes of insight, and prayer. I don’t know how to describe such a reality except as a deep inner-knowingness, or as a communication between God and the soul.
And then there’s the fact that reality – of either sort – is not known to any of us in full. We’re always working with partial evidence. So how do we fill in the gaps with reasonable confidence when our side of the story is always incomplete? And how do we reconcile two apparently contradictory realities? How do we let our sense of a spiritual reality inform our understanding of the observable reality, and vice versa?
These questions make me dizzy, and yet I let them play through my mind again and again. I have no easy answers. All I have, really, is a tangle of words. Perhaps someone wiser than I will tidy them up and clear a path through all the mess.