All of us go home each evening, and at some moment in time, with whatever degree of consciousness, we go back over all the signs, seeking justification that aids in the continuity of our discourse. This happens when our adolescence is lost and the adulthood we once claimed to crave begins to turn into a real and narrowing system of responsibilities that constrain us.
Yet we cannot become aware or understand quickly enough to grasp the risks of being “well-adjusted.” We cannot reprogram our minds to escape the doubts, traumas, and fears that hinder our desires. Not only that, our brain sits in a body that is gradually aging. Although we strive to slow this clock, our bodies are biologically programmed to destroy the information pattern that makes us.
The harsh truth is that suffering is an unavoidable reality. The more we avoid struggling, the more we suffer, because insignificant and trivial matters begin to torture us in proportion to our fear of being hurt. The one who welcomes suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers least. It is in her own existence, her own being, that is at once the subject and source of gratitude, and her very consciousness is her greatest joy.
This does not mean one must seek suffering (as I’ve come to learn this year). One must simply endure it as it comes, never attempting to create the incident. What terrible tragedies people suffer through realism. I know this first hand because there is no order in me, you see. And so, everything is hell. The year 2024 has been my most youthful time, and it continues peaking in the first week of the new year, and will unfold onward.
As I write these words, I’m on a flight from Palm Springs to Toronto, reflecting on the signs from my recent travels to Miami, the Bahamas, and Los Angeles. I’m searching for meaning in the stories I witnessed—stories I’m not yet able to put into words. For another time. What I can share now—wishing you the same—is a phrase that caught my eye in a book I’m reading 30,000 feet in the air. And so it goes:
“Glory to the highest in the world. Glory to the highest in me.”
