Dreams [aspirations] are the art form of hope. They paint a picture of the life we desire. It is impossible to enjoy life to the fullest without dreams. And I believe we were certainly created to enjoy life. We don't have to teach children to laugh. Joy, celebration, and even happiness are the natural environments for the human spirit. Have you ever considered just how difficult it is to fake a real laugh? The imitation is easy to spot. We might have faith in the wrong things and we might later discover our true love to be only of the puppy variety, but we are never confused about whether something is funny.
This can be downright depressing if we think about it long enough. I would rather be right about what I believe or about who I love than have a discerning sense of comedy. At the end of our lives what really is the evolutionary value of laughter? Yet, as it has often been said, it is somehow strangely true that laughter is the best medicine.
When you study any life form, we can discover its proper environment by what brings it health and makes it thrive. Some plants require shade; others direct sunlight; still others only partial sunlight. Some species are designed to thrive in deserts while others can only exist in tropical rain forests. Move a plant out of its natural habitat and it will quickly deteriorate in both health and vitality.
People are no different. Put them in an environment filled with bitterness, despair or detachment and it doesn't take too long to see the resulting negative effect. Despite perhaps seeming superficial, the human spirit thrives where there is laughter. Perhaps we should take happiness more seriously. Somehow we live in a world where those societies who have the highest concentration of human wealth also have the highest percentage of people medicated for depression. I guess it just goes to show that we can't buy happiness. But somehow that doesn't seem to keep us from trying.
I remember laughing when I was a young boy ... I also remember when the laughter stopped after my mother's suicide. Nothing much seemed funny in my adolescent years [maybe that is just par for the course ... but then again maybe not]. My girls' teenage years, on the other hand, seemed to be a barrel of laughs. For me, I was in pretty sad shape. Trapped in a universe that I couldn't get out of or worse yet even understand, I was quickly losing hope. I didn't realize at the time just how essential hope was to getting out of bed in the morning ... yet still somehow I got out of bed every day at 3:00 AM to deliver the morning newspaper [perhaps it was because I didn't really have the choice to stay in bed].
Our souls get into trouble when we stop believing in hope. Still I had dreams of a different life ... one where I would graduate from college and move into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and somehow find myself in the solitude. It would seem that no matter how difficult our lives are, if we can imagine better ones, that can somehow pull us through. My biggest confusion during my high school years involved figuring out just who God was and why, or better yet how, He could love me. Add my intrigue with the French existentialist philosophers to the mix and hopelessness became almost a given.
Yet I learned that our souls crave truth, beauty, wonder and love. Our souls yearn to dream, to imagine, and simply just to understand who we are and why we are here. Our souls crave to connect, to commune, and to create. And should we become convinced that all these things are merely illusions to be dispensed of [as part of my soul did during my high school years] then our souls become sick.
One ink blot I saw during my college psychology class clearly gave me a choice between a bat and a butterfly. I saw them both, and I fully understood the implications. Which would I choose? Seriously, how does one choose what to do when our souls want butterflies but the world keeps sending us bats? Perhaps we become Batman ... taking our worst fears and making them our strengths. But really ... how do we do that? I never really got answers to those questions but I became convinced at least that asking the questions was a good thing.
And during my college years I began to realize that all of us have a common struggle. While there may be an endless number of philosophies and religions in the world and while we may all disagree on the answers, all of us have the same questions, the same longings, the same cravings.
When I was just a small child, I believed in God, in love and in laughter -- and then I didn't. I think love went first, then laughter. And then since God couldn't help me with the first two, I went ahead and threw Him out with everything else you need to get rid of when you are no longer a child [these were my high school years]. But before you get shocked and think too badly of me, please know that almost immediately I wanted them all back. I just didn't realize how intimately they were all connected together. Imagine my surprise when I began to discover that the things that came so naturally to me as a child were the very things my soul was craving.
I think I gave away my soul at a very young age. By this I mean I gave up on myself. My mom, dad and even step-mom never did and were always saying I "could do anything I set my mind on." I just never believed them ... at least not until my fourth semester of college when it was put up or shut up time. I had just dropped a Physics class that I had a D in and just barely passed my Thermodynamics class the previous semester. I had serious doubts as to whether I should even be in college and really had no idea at all as to why I was there, except that it was what came next after high school.
When we give up on ourselves, we start throwing out things like our dreams, our optimism [we become pessimists who just call themselves "realists"], our hope, intimacy, love, trust, truth, meaning, and even our faith. Looking back now, I realize that I was just paralyzed by fear. I was terrified that I was nothing and would never amount to anything. Deep inside this ever-expanding universe known as my soul, I was drowning in a quickly rising ocean of self-doubt and despair. And I know from experience that is isn't enough just to survive.
... To be continued ...
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