An observer more astute than I noted that life is a process of having your illusions destroyed, one after another, until you die.
I read that recently and knew it to be true.
My mind is a mercurial trickster: a spinner of phantasmagorias that has enticed and seduced me with mirages and wild imaginings which I have long crystallized into illusory beliefs.
I cringe at the times I humiliated myself by running down a fruitless path, capriciously chasing after some juvenile fancy, while drunk on the self-assurance that I would cross the bridge to glory, only to dead-end at a wall of nothingness.
I know I’m not the only one who’s wasted precious years of my life like that — far from it.
The difference, I suppose, between myself and others is that when I’ve reached that point of humiliation — and I have, many times over — I’ve admitted my error and turned around, retracing my steps back to my place of solitude and retreat.
Most people, I’ve observed, remain on the familiar path and insist on their correctness until their final breath, pacing over the same worn ground while foolishly casting hope for a different outcome, lest they ever acknowledge their own ignorance and folly.
After years of futile wandering, having collapsed from mental exhaustion, what I now see clearly is that every path is an illusion.
There is no grand road to walk — only tiny movements in one direction or another, guided by whatever instruction is given in the moment.
The movements themselves aren’t constant: much of life is meant to be spent in the absence of motion, suspended in silence, waiting in expectation.
The problem, of course, is that serenity isn’t exciting. I must admit that in the nursery room of my mind, I’ve often found the essential retreat quite boring.
It’s more enticing to spend your days running through a disorienting maze of deafening distractions than to sit in the simplicity and stillness of truth.
Groundedness requires discipline and restraint: the hard-earned fruits of humility and endurance — infinitely rewarding but thoroughly unsexy in their countenance.
It’s no coincidence that those who derive their power from casting spells have warped “woke” into a pejorative utterance, and that so many under their sorcery have embraced the contortion.
It’s far easier to sleepwalk, to be in slumber and dreaming like a little titty baby, dazzled by fallacious projections that tickle the emotions and senses, than to be awake, alert, and attentive to the quiet machinations of the soul.
But now arrives a point of culmination: a time when enough people — although certainly not all — are rising as if from some absurd fever dream, groggy and stumbling in the waking moments of clarity.
What becomes evident in lucidity is that we have spun a nightmare of our own design, a childish and perverted distortion of our shared imagination to remain entrenched in a threadbare and monstrous delusion, thoroughly inadequate for the wisdom and maturity that will soon be required of each of us.
Not everyone will abandon the paths of illusion: There will always be the hollow walking characters who insist on the enchantment of their imagined course, loudly proclaiming their righteousness at every turn. I will no longer coddle or indulge them.
Indeed, the time for entertaining the infants is over, and I will spend the remainder of my life shattering their illusions at each appointed moment.
The babies will rage and scream, but their bellowing will not penetrate me. In the absence of direction, I will retreat to my place of seclusion and remain there, at peace.