"I was always really drawn to the idea that all people were in search of the transcendental (It seems hip (like something that is good to tell someone you’ve just met (or basically anyone you want to impress with your asinine-ness (Looking back on it, when I was arrogantly turning down beers at the age of 17 (even though I probably would have given anything just to know “what it was like,” (hell I still wish I could figure out a way to get high without “God getting mat at me” (these quotations serve not to communicate any lack of faith in the existence of God, more so to exhibit the fact that it wouldnt actually be God getting mad (does God still get mad? That’s another tangent I suppose (As if it is even worth pretending that one tangent might actually not have anything to do with another (Even in this “thought” thus far I have clearly been exhibiting that everything is linked inextricably to everything else even if it is “real butnot capable of being produced by the algebraical operations of addition, multiplication, and involution, or the inverse operations” (And now it seems we have come full circle back to my original idea of transcendentalism! (Thus proving my point)))))))))))).
Anyways, it’s interesting isn’t it? The fact that, no matter the vehicle though which we find it easiest to conduct our own search, we are all shuffling our feet through the sandy beaches, waiving our wands over the bumpy grains, avoiding the ebbing tides, waiting for that rhythmic beeping from our detectors to quicken. And somehow, in a day and age when we grow weary of waiting for a 30-second commercial to end, we can wander from sun up to sun down waiting patiently for the transcendental. Sometimes we find it in the 90th minute of a Ryan Gosling movie; you know what I mean. Your heart is beating harder against your ribcage, your throat and head throb from holding back the relentless urges to “shed a few” over the past hour and a half. And about the time you realize those two passed away in that tiny bed together, you realize to yourself, “This is what life is all about. Finding your love, building her a house, growing a sweet beard, and holding on to her until the end. That’s where happiness lies!” Or perhaps when you reach down and pull The Notebook from the shifting sands, you toss it into the water and watch it get pulled back into the ocean before you renew your own search for “It,” for the transcendental. Sometimes we find it when we’re packed like sardines into a bar, watching some skinny dude fill the room with reverbed-out guitar chords, and you KNOW you could die happy right there. And when God, standing at those pearly white gates, asks you what that short life was all about, you can have an answer for him (although I wouldn’t be too sure you’re right). Or maybe you hate that music, maybe you like Ne-Yo. You might love to team-toss that skinny rock’n’roller into the ocean and watch him try to surf that Six-stringed hunk of wood back to shore. Nonetheless, you start your search yet again.
Point being, we are all rubbing shoulders, bumping our Metal (Transcendental) Detectors into each other, waiting lifetimes for sparks to catch fire, for that long skinny Tetris piece to come and fill in the gaps perfectly. And it’s beautiful, really. The world is bursting at the seems with beautiful artwork and wonderful charities. Tear-jerkers abound these days, and it isn’t difficult to be inspired (which is a GREAT thing). But our problem is, when someone’s beeps quicken, when they pull from the wet sand exactly what they think they were looking for, we all snap our fingers and groan and check our watches (or more likely cell phones these days).
We love these things, movies, music, art, friendships, literature, not because they themselves are what we are looking for, not because they themselves are transcendental. We love them because they bring us to the feet of God, THE transcendental. And really (in my desperate, parenthetical attempt to maintain some sort of metaphor in all of this), most of the time I bet God just wants us to empty our pockets and end our search. Then we might look up and see that we have been shoving past PEOPLE. Then we might look out and see the sun set on our last day of searching. We might find pain, beauty, humor and harmony where Aaron Weiss from mewithoutYOU and St. Francis of Assisi found it; in the sun and the moon."
xoxo
No comments:
Post a Comment