Aside – unobtrusive lucidity

Half Awake

I used to have these night terrors as a child, and even occasionally through college. I would be half awake, struggling to break fully free of sleep, but find myself paralyzed. I would push, and strain, and try to scream, afraid that if I stopped, I would fall backward into a state from which I would never come back. Eventually, I would wake up.

That’s what this current state of suspended animation feels like. I’m pushing, straining, trying to get to the end. Accepting parts of this would be easy…always being virtual, the end of busyness, staying “safe.” Just assimilate, stop fighting. But, while I’m discovering that placing such a high value on busyness was wrong…that I had become the person I had never wanted to be…so is giving into the throes of despair, a darkness from which one cannot awaken.

Eventually, we will wake up. We will. And there will be sunlight. There will be joy in the morning.

Nostalgia

What is it about nostalgia that makes the past always seem better? Is it that things are getting progressively worse? Or is it just a distorted lens?

The Tools of Conquest

I recently read The Stories We Tell by Mike Cosper. It’s a theological exploration of themes in modern story-telling as they play out in television and film. It’s not a heavy read, and as thoroughly entertaining as it is thought-provoking.

Stories capture themes that are timeless, warning of futures that could happen. Sometimes they peek out from the past, old stories that suddenly become appropos, that we perhaps wish had been heard and considered more thoughtfully back then. Cosper quotes one of those, from the Twilight Zone:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices-to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill. And suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own…” Rod Sterling, “The Twilight Zone”

I think that it’s import to consider today what the fallout of our suspicions, prejudices, and searches for scapegoats will be the future. Perhaps our children will wonder why we didn’t listen to our stories.