Shade

The brick in my apartment is now shaded. It is a calm Wednesday evening. It has been a week of guilt and shame and doubt and fear of if where I am is where I should be, if who I love is who I am meant to love. One of the greatest and most solidifying qualities of being human, one of the things that truly elevates us past the realm of animals and gives us conscious awareness and thus fear and thus hope and thus mortality, is our perpetual ability to question if what we are doing is right. Animals are concerned with survival and perpetuation of genetic information. Humans are concerned with comfort and certainty and loving themselves. In this sense, humans desire an assurance, a fact, an undoubted light in their hearts that they are real, that we are not imposters to our values, to our dreams, or to our pursuits, we desire an undoubted durability that we are good, and that we will ultimately bring good into the world and that we will have made this place better when we are no longer here. We desire a certainty in that we do good, and we mean good. This desire to know and totally feel these things causes doubts and questions to arise. What happens when our actions begin to express a morality or values that we don’t practice daily, that we don’t constantly remind ourselves of in times of stagnation or read in self-help books and write down on vision boards? What happens when those values cannot be found in an action or even a thought that flows through us? What happens to our certainty and stance on being good when an action cuts the alignment in two and we are no longer facing the summit, or standing in the light of hope and betterment? What happens when we look back into the valley and desire its ease and its cool shade of negation and apathy? Ascension is hard. Standing in the light is hard. Holding yourself accountable to the rhythm and the standard required to climb the mountain of self-improvement and living well is hard. Sometimes the eyes and the feet turn back to the ease of destruction and apathy and turn to find indulgence in the ease of just surviving, doing the minimum to breathe each day, turning our eyes back to where animals exist and where humans ascend from. We turn our eyes back to the place humanity has moved on from, or where you as an individual has moved on from, where we once climbed out of negation and survival with our hope for self awareness and knowledge and ideas of proving that we are good things in a chaotic universe, and finally, that we can bring good to this chaotic universe and lessen the entropy. Animals are not concerned with loving themselves and thus are not concerned with pursuing good or coming off as a good being or leaving their environment and their relations in a better place when they leave. Animals seek survival and perpetuation. Humans seek to love themselves and a certainty in their understanding of themselves, the ultimate comfort: completely knowing yourself and knowing yourself as a good thing that brought good to the world and to those around them. But what about the actions that align with values and desires not spoken of, ideas and chemical thoughts driven by psychological drivers from deep unwanted trauma or memories, the base values of an animal that bubble to the top of our golden pyramid of values that we structure throughout our lives as we seek to be a good for ourselves, a good for society, and again, thus, loving ourselves because we know we mean well? What happens when we mess up that pursuit? What happens when we falter in a well-lived, best effort? What happens when we don’t do our best and we know it? What fucking happens then?