On reflection

On reading back today I can see how dark some of this writing is.
It can be so hard to articulate the relentlessness of despair,
so when we do it does have a rather desperate feel to it.
What can be so useful about writing is it's a way of emptying,
of facing the worst excesses of those darker feelings.
Learning to feel without necessarily responding.

And so it is a form of learning what should already be known
that feelings pass and the edge recedes when we turn our minds.
Thus learning to turn our minds becomes the crux of it I suppose,
a part of what distinguishes genuine maturity from the immature,
an understanding that in reacting as we do to the general whirl,
we are choosing and in effect abandoning rationality altogether.

I wonder how it would be if we were able to taste the bitterness
of the troubles we can’t even begin to see in the lives of others.
What perspective would it grant us in a fundamental understanding
that life is ferociously hard on many of us in one way or another
and what feels like a very individual struggle is actually universal.
So perhaps the reason we respond as we do is that pain calls to us.

Where then is the role of healing in all this bleak despondency.
How do we learn to travel a new road through the mire of despair.
How can we acquire the necessary discipline so foreign to us,
after so many years of increasingly self indulgent tinkering.
How appealing does the serious practise of discipline seem
in comparison to yet more rounds of the cycle of destruction.