Brick by brick

To write more means to become more vulnerable. Lately it seems I’ve been doing a lot of things that leave me susceptible to hurt and rejection. But unless I do that, I am depriving myself of joy, and excitement, and laughter and happiness too. I spent a lot of my time building up defenses against the bleakness of life without realizing those defenses were suddenly getting so strong, that the happiness of life was being blocked too. In turn, by attempting to protect myself all I did was inevitably make things worse. It was a cycle I could not see until I was literally broken free of it. I remember reading a book as a kid at my grandparent’s house in Illinois, about a person who built up walls, brick by brick, until there was space for just one more brick. Just when it all seemed hopeless, someone walking by handed the person behind the wall a flower through the hole that was left. I wish I knew the book, I wish I could find the image. Words don’t capture the feeling the same way.

Anyway, I think as we grow, we start to build that wall, brick by brick, without even realizing it. As we get older, and lose the childhood innocence we don’t know we have until it is gone, the world starts to seep in, and slowly we throw up a defense. Against pain. Lies. Fear. Doubt. Betrayal. Jealousy. Rejection. Grief. As we start to experience and acknowledge what those feelings are, we put up defenses against them. The problem, as I see it, is as those bricks go up, we start to suffocate our emotional growth and spiritual vulnerability. I imagine God as that person from my picture, handing the flower through the teeny space left. Because sometimes that’s all that’s there. Sometimes, there’s less room, or no room, and the whole wall has to be knocked aside, figuratively or literally. How can we grow if we refuse to move from where we are? How can we have hope to grow if we squeeze faith out of our lives entirely?

Imagine a pond in the middle of the summer on a hot still day…water stagnant, with bugs skimming the surface. The heat hangs above the water in a haze, everything is still. Humid. Unmoving. I don’t want my life to be that way. I want my life to be like white-water rafting. Beautiful, slightly unpredictable, both exciting and tranquil, an adventure, one worth telling. And there’s no way I’ll live a life that way if I refuse to move.

Faith, hope, trust, those things lead to an adventurous life. Because where are we without faith? And what is faith? Belief and trust that something out there is bigger than us. Sure, of course, life is not always sunshine and daises. Things happen. It is how we handle those things…how we conduct ourselves in the midst of the sludge and come out on the other side that help us grow, and be an example for someone else who may have to go through the same thing. I am not a model of perfection. I have been on the merry-go-round of life moving way too fast. That white-knuckle experience lasted long enough for me to relish in the simplicity of my life today. I’ve broken down walls, brick by brick, and I have a short list of things that occupy my time. As that starts to grow I want to be sure that the list grows with things I can be proud of. I’m grateful today, that I get a second chance. It’s pleasing to think that some of my best days are ahead of me. There’s that hope thing again.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas!

Quotes

I was searching quotes today, and these are a few I’ve found that made me go, hmm.

Just because something is unbelievable does not mean you shouldn’t believe it.  Put another way, some things are worth believing in whether they’re true or not.  ~Jeb Dickerson

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.  ~Eric Hoffer

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours.  But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places.  Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.  ~H.A. Overstreet

Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.  ~Robert Browning

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.  ~Victor Hugo

Music is an outburst of the soul.  ~Frederick Delius

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.  ~Alphonse de Lamartine

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.  ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive.  And then go and do that.  Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.  ~Attributed to Howard Thurman

Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.  ~James A. Froude

There are joys which long to be ours.  God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.  ~Dr. Alexis Carrel

Be still.

This video was very moving for me. I hope you like it too. If you have faith in God or some sort of being bigger than yourself, maybe it’ll move you too.

BE HERE NOW from blaine hogan on Vimeo.