Resist and Return

I notice that when sick, when threatened by an existential threat, or given a daunting task that we put a particular light on this event. Unpleasant and stark as it is to feel; stories, films, photography even have many examples of presenting a person being engaged.

The longest, the most horrible experience is the silent one; which I find mostly confined to written texts, though we remember as soon as forget what it’s like being in the grip of an illness we cannot immediately defeat.

What happens when you can barely raise your head? When sleep will not come? Resistance can feel like an eternity, especially in the digitised age of mockery and scorn, where it is easy to feel isolated and detached.

But the return to our roots, restoration of our health, finding that better self or coming back to a memory we love is often the source of our greatest strength. I do not find it a coincidence than when things seem most desperate and most helpless, that the oldest memories of childhood, the words of friends and loved ones come to the surface.

“I can’t do this today” is followed by a day hoping and praying for all we enjoy again. It is the shifting of the seasons, the bloody awful downpour that will end in time, and one can only go forward.

Terror, apathy, weariness at feeling misunderstood are some of the largest and most constant psychological monsters that the oppressive and malevolent enjoy stirring up in others. Sometimes the needs we have for survival, or quiet, or recovery are intruded upon. Challenges and doubts do not sleep, and often the approach is “then neither will I”.

Sometimes a looming threat, be it to the mind, the body or the soul lopes forward greedily, and it comes on the day you are simply not ready. Then our own personal story can diverge as we go about surmounting it.

Sometimes, our ego is knocked down, and we return to what matters, with humility of a body we have insufficiently respected, or need to treat better.

Sometimes, we recover when remembering our own ability, our tenacity, and finish the steps of creation despite the exhaustion and forgetting where or when we began.

It is important always to stand, to pursue the good in life despite the roaring flame of challenges and chaos, and my writing is dedicated to saying a great deal about that. But one can be working at their own good from bed at times, and even when the sky seems to be falling about you; there is the seed of your soul and a welcoming past that beckons through the fever and leads you out of your present hell.