Insidious Adaptation

It isn't that we have such great lives, and that man as a whole is not living in his own squalor, but it's the fact that there is a reprieve offered. There is a way out of suffering, out of heartache, there is a peace that can be found here on earth that few really allow themselves to see. One could argue that man has a desire to suffer, living in destruction, to harm one another to then receive harm. We know that if people are suffering in the world that even as calloused as we have become, saturated with news of horrors unheard of in our own life, that we still hurt because others hurt. We can continue to distance in our minds of the suffering of other people, but we hurt, or we distance ourselves from the reality of it. When we start, in one way or another, to distance from the reality of human suffering, we all suffer. Think about when you read a memoir about some horrors a man or woman has lived through. We read these things as stories, yet there is a thin strand of re...

This world is oftentimes like a piece of gum. When the gum is taken in, it is so sweet and fills the mouth with flavor, for nothing is like a good piece of mint gum after a meal. This gum however, becomes a burden when we chew it for too long. Yet, oftentimes the obligation to continue chewing past the pleasurable part keeps us in misery. We hold on to the movement of this formless wad between our teeth, and yet all flavor and thus pleasure is gone. We think to put another in, and then another, for if two tastes good, imagine three. The pleasures of this world, the promises to satisfy our needs sadly fall very short. I only say sadly because that after all is where most people waste their time, me included. Yet, we know the truth inside that we are meant for more than this world, that we have a higher standard, and that we aren't born good. We are sinners who fail to do the right thing, think the right thing, and perform to at least some kind of moral compass everyday. We know ...

"All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?" - Proverbs 20:24 What are we called to do with the short amount of time we have here on earth? Honestly, are we to live in this perpetual cycle of ups and downs, building some self-fulfilling legacy that in 1 year, 10 years, 100 years is dead anyway? The man who invented some of our most-common household items, what was his name again? We look and glorify the people of the present as though they are what we would like, yet, we fail to see that the focus and adherence to the present makes us die in the moment. " Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding"- Proverbs 3:13   Looking to the future is deemed "unhealthy" in the world of psychology. We are called to be "mindful" of the here and now, yet, we fail to see what mindfulness is anyway. We fail to see that when we are being "present" what we are doing oftentimes is succumbing to...