Reach Out and Touch Faith
I say reach down and grab dirt.
The night we went night hiking, N told us to go without flashlights. I was intimidated by the dark, and I was very out of shape. So to juggle all the challenges at once was a bit overbearing. N said, "your eyes will adjust." I knew they would. Much like everything else in life. You adapt. You adjust. And before you know it, it might not be all that clear still, but it's all good. But then you still get scared. You're stuck in a hiccup, and the only way to get over it is if you stopped thinking about it. But it's hard not to think about it. So we started chatting between the huffs and the puffs. N shared a story about some sort of Native American Indian youth training thing (I could be wrong). Pretty much like rituals you see in 300 or something where a child must venture on his own to the wilderness and learn how to survive. He was told to walk out into the absolute darkness, and stand there for god-knew how long. Except he was given a code word to yell out in case something really shitty happened, and a big brother would come to the rescue -
You know those psychoanalysis questions about standing in the dark, or absolute whiteness, or fog so deep you can't even see your hands and feet? Not to spoil it for anyone, but usually it's about how we perceive death - the ultimate absolute and the ultimate unknown. I think that's why I'm intimidated by the dark, and developed fear of falling in my late-teens, early-adulthood. Living begets living; as I got older, somehow I wanted to live longer. So you get scared. It's a strange feeling when you drop - miss a step on the stairs, walk into a hole, something - and you feel your heart's left you for a split second. Perhaps that's what a robot feels like all the time. Like the tin-man.
Anyway, so he said it was pretty scary. I would have been scared to move at all because I'd feel that my next step would lead me into an abyss. But then what N did to remedy that fear was absolutely brilliant: "I reached down and grabbed the dirt around my feet."
How come I didn't think of that?
He felt the ground, the earth in his hands, and he knew he was there.
It was so simple. All important things in life is just that simple. Like security.
We walked down the slope, and I turned off my flashlight. I slid a few times, but as N said, my body did the work to help me balance and that wasn't so bad. The lit path was more distracting because the roughness of the rocks on the slippery sand made me over-think my every move. The darkness wasn't so scary after all. Only in such condition one could feel infinite. And when you're ready to feel your heart beat again, all you have to do is reach down and grab some dirt.
The night we went night hiking, N told us to go without flashlights. I was intimidated by the dark, and I was very out of shape. So to juggle all the challenges at once was a bit overbearing. N said, "your eyes will adjust." I knew they would. Much like everything else in life. You adapt. You adjust. And before you know it, it might not be all that clear still, but it's all good. But then you still get scared. You're stuck in a hiccup, and the only way to get over it is if you stopped thinking about it. But it's hard not to think about it. So we started chatting between the huffs and the puffs. N shared a story about some sort of Native American Indian youth training thing (I could be wrong). Pretty much like rituals you see in 300 or something where a child must venture on his own to the wilderness and learn how to survive. He was told to walk out into the absolute darkness, and stand there for god-knew how long. Except he was given a code word to yell out in case something really shitty happened, and a big brother would come to the rescue -
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| Generation Pop Art |
Anyway, so he said it was pretty scary. I would have been scared to move at all because I'd feel that my next step would lead me into an abyss. But then what N did to remedy that fear was absolutely brilliant: "I reached down and grabbed the dirt around my feet."
How come I didn't think of that?
He felt the ground, the earth in his hands, and he knew he was there.
It was so simple. All important things in life is just that simple. Like security.
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