The Forge

I sat in the passenger seat, gazing down the highway and up at the sprawling sky above it. I'd been doing a similar thing all day, but it struck me that the trees were a bit darker now than they'd been several hours ago. The clouds were a little bit more menacing, and some of the cars passing on the other side had their headlights on. Evening was upon us.

And that's when i was struck by the notion that i was living in a very, very little box. My little box has a clock in the corner with twelve little points on its little face. I've come to understand that when the little hand on the little face has hit each of the little points two times, a little box in time has closed, opening a new little box for me to inhabit. There is no continuity in my little boxes, there is simply the inevitable, unstoppable progression of separate little units wherein only menial little tasks can be accomplished.

But that's not what life is supposed to be, not at all. Life is supposed to be one huge open-ended chain of possibilities. The clocks can be tossed out the window for all it matters, because all they really do is help us keep our cages locked up. And when we stop living in little boxes, the tasks we can accomplish are suddenly huge, meaningful, and can have eternal consequences.

I've been compartmentalizing my entire life. Despite every word i've ever uttered about being the same person in the dark as in the light, despite every time my integrity has been complimented, i've been living a series of well-calculated, well-separated lies. Actually, calling it a series isn't quite right--it implies progress. No, i've just been living in a collection of lies, each seemingly truthful when taken alone but disgusting when viewed together.

I'm not necessarily talking about a Jekyll/Hyde sort of scenario. I am, in mannerisms, speech, attitude, and most other manifestations of character the identical person in all areas of my life. God knows i have my dark secrets, but then He and i are working those out.

The point is that i have thus been unable to amalgamate the different facets of my life that i tend to otherwise list together as the parts of my whole. My church life, my school lives (here in Pawling and that at GCC), my gaming life, my family life; each is its own entity, only rarely overlapping with another and then in an entirely accidental way.

When i'm at college, i am engulfed by all that college implies. My friends, my home, my elders, my time, my activities are all located on or in proximity to the campus, and the world beyond that locus fades to the faintest of my thoughts. I'm sure my friends and family have noticed a sharp diminution in contact during the months i am not among them, but i don't think i've been much concerned with it.

The same can be said with each of the areas i listed earlier. When i am with the circle of friends i formed while in the Pawling school system, i tend to forget about the other friends. It has only rarely crossed my mind to intermingle, and while such experimentation has certainly not ended poorly, it has evidently not been successful enough for my subconscious to raise it as a suggestion more often than extremely occasionally.

My recent trip to Maine brought together a different, extraordinarily tight-knit collective of friends and family that drove me to (despite my numerous facebook updates) largely ignore or put off anything outside of Maine that might have been vying for my attention. Granted, this was somewhat the point of driving ten hours away, but the fact remains that i left messages from old roommates and new acquaintances by the wayside, unable to mentally deal with them until i had returned to the world from whence they'd come.

I mentioned in my previous update that i feel a strong need to redirect my life. Part of that, i'm discovering, is integrating the parts of me into something i can live with on a daily basis. I fully know that i wish to maintain good relations with friends and family on all levels, whether here in my own house or overseas via an xbox live connection. And the first step in doing that is to accept the fact that, as much as my mind wants me to, i cannot create barriers between the different dimensions of my life. It's nothing but self-deception.

As i looked at that darkening sky today, i realized that the sky was only really that dark because the massive terrestrial ball i am on was spinning, and that the point i inhabited was slowly moving to the side facing away from the sun. The glorious sunlight that i'd been enjoying a few hours earlier was now, in a limited sense, shining down on friends in California.

Viewing our lives in a limited sense is comfortable, and helps us deal with changes by pretending that they have not eradicated the past, but simply created a different present. But string theories can only take us so far, and besides all we are doing is trapping ourselves in little boxes.

Only when we accept the largeness of life can we truly begin to live it.