Feel the Pain

There are parts, facets, tasks in life that a person must do to keep alive, which applies to the saying that some people die at the age of twenty five and are buried at seventy five. I think it was Ben Franklin. I ask myself, why do I avoid those things over and over?

During my senior year of college, I came to the conclusion that I needed three things to happen in order to have a good day: prayer, reading, and exercise. If I had those three, then all was well. That list has changed since then because I'd add something like writing onto that reading line, but for the most part it's who I am, which lately has come with a happy acceptance of that reality. I am who I am. Sure, there are sins that keep me from those higher, truer parts of myself, but it's all there waiting to be redeemed. A nice thought for sure.

This brings me back to the five day absence of writing on this blog. What's the trouble, just post something and be done with it. The trouble, the horrible horrible, troubling trouble is that those important things, those things that make me feel alive- because that's what I was really saying when I said they are required for a good day- are the individual and unique things I do. They are the special gifts- without the modern obsession with contribution, efficiency, and all that other garbage that kills pure, budding talent- in all of us that many never realize. It's all simple and pure when looked at from the outside, someone else that is, someone else's life. There they are, you said it, just follow through with what you said.

But where does the apprehension come from?

The quick answer is sin. The long answer is fear of that being abused or hurt, or feeling some kind of pain due to my exposure to reality, which all of those activities do. Yes, believe or not, we are creatures who do not like pain, even if it's good for us, and by good for us I mean actually there, true, whatever you want to call that. It is.

I run from prayer, I run from writing and reading, I run from exercise (though this one is the hardest to fit into that category of causing pain, though it is pain in a strictly physical sense), but they all are life giving. Insane. How do I ingrain these practices in my life?

Cardinal Newman said one difference between the true Christian and the false one is the first keeps God's law when it is simply that, God's law. There is no other benefit to obeying other than God said it.

The truth is some things in life are good and not easy to attain in the least.

What's the thing you're avoiding?


Btw, sorry for the pause in entries, whoever it is out there in cyberland that reads these things.