Au Naturale

I don't think I spelled that correctly.

It has been a while since I mused here (rest assured, I've not stopped musing), and I find the urge to do so again. As someone who analyzes himself and his surroundings with certain determination (if not accuracy), I'm fluctuating always between what comes naturally to me and what I think should come naturally to me. Here we are. You can decide which of these two monsters is clattering at the keys.

Before I retire at night, I try and come to conclusions. It's become more of a habit than a conscious effort, like the life lessons which used to follow cartoons or live-action Saturday morning programming. At some point, these messages become either redundant or completely trivial, but they continue regardless. Always, I'm try to discern a truth which will set me on towards success, righteousness, spiritual peace, or emotional freedom. I'm not sure I care which, and maybe that's just part of the problem.

My au naturale approach is just one in a number of countless maxims which I've instituted for as long as they proved effective. A markedly optimistic person would say that I am approaching an absolute truth. A largely pessimistic person would say that I am striving in vain for an answer I will never find. Your average person would probably say I'm thinking too much. At times, I lend myself to each perspective.

I have discovered something blocking my thought processes all the time. Almost a kind of intoxicated gray haze, it prevents real concentration, total development of thought. Admitting to what that could be (age, broken heart, hunger, destroyed brain cells/a traumatized mind, the subconscious wisdom that my musings are purposefully self limiting) seems to do nothing for the process. What does is being able to talk to someone about it. Despite my beloved friendship circle, I find myself at times incapable of trusting others, or ashamed to reveal myself. At times, I speak openly to myself. I wonder openly if this is how psychosis starts. According to some people, I'm crazy already. It's part of my hesistation to open a discourse. It wasn't always that way, though.

My darkest thoughts these days would probably not disturb most people. Well, maybe the Machiavellian ones. Still, there's an undercurrent to all that I do which seems irrevocably tied to virtue. Please note: this does not make me a good person, just one with a hyperactive conscience. I believe that when people do good deeds, it comes from a place of love or a place of guilt, or both. Occasionally, people are motivated by righteous truth. This though, is a fire which does not burn continuously, but fitfully and circumstantially, just enough to tow a bottom line. It's a Bruce Willisian kind of "good".

When you fall in love, you are enveloped by a sense of confidence. Total faith is something that is difficult for a person of my analytic obessiveness to achieve unassisted. What we feel may be false, it may be true. Time will tell, as it always does (or never does, I guess, depending on the duration of the question). If love (and I mean, pure, unadultered commitment and passion) doesn't pan out -- for whatever reason -- the consequences are dire. It is not in our nature to give up. It is not in our nature to let go. We pursue acceptance only as a segway to a peace. When we emerge from such a loss, however that emergence is achieved, we are different people. Not better. Not worse. But different. We envy the chameleon and the butterfly, but in the end we humans have a greater propensity for corruption, redemption, modification, adaptation. And always, always, with some ability to choose -- if not how we feel, than how or if we act on those feelings.