Enlightenment

“We have to remember to look up. A child taught me that.” –Cook

                Do you ever have those moments when all the sudden things are clear? It’s as if you’ve been walking around in a fog when all of the sudden everything is strikingly bright and lucid. When you actually see the things around you instead of just looking at them. When you realize that you’ve never truly looked at someone’s face that you’ve known for years until just now and when you do you don’t even recognize them. When you notice the color of the buildings on the street you walk along every day.

                The monotony of everyday life sometimes makes us feel like we’re dreaming. But it’s so subtle that we don’t even realize it. It lulls us to sleep and we don’t even know that we’re unconscious until something wakes us up. Remember when you were a kid, and you fell asleep on the couch watching TV, but when you woke up in your own bed the next morning you don’t even remember feeling sleepy? It’s like that. The feelings that go along with this being unknowingly asleep are confusing. It’s confusing because there is calmness on both ends. Being a sleep brings a false sense of calmness. It’s a calmness over a background of sadness, of dullness, of lack of purpose and self. When you wake up you feel a calm that resonates through you and imitates through your very being. You’re refreshed, with new meaning, and new understanding.

                What happens in the middle is where it gets a little messy. Something happens that makes you feel alive. You get angry or sad. But I’m not talking mad like you got a parking ticket or sad like you lost five dollars. No. I’m talking earth shakingly mad and sad. Real, raw emotion. The kind of anger and sadness you feel when you hear about a man walking into an elementary school and unloading bullets into children. These are things that force you to wake from your stupor. And just like waking up from a deep sleep, you try resist. You don’t want to wake up. You want to live in the calmness of sleep where you don’t have to deal with things you can’t explain or grief you didn’t think you were capable of feeling. You fight with every particle of your being to stay asleep, to forget the sound of your alarm, to forget the horrors the day. But you can’t. You can’t forget the sounds, the sights, and most of all you can’t forget the feelings. All the fighting within ourselves is where the clarity comes from. Without the fighting there would be no more understanding that before. Labor before fruit. That’s why, often times, these moments come hours, days, weeks, months after whatever caused our frustration. We may even hit snooze, and forget about our sadness and anger for years until something similar comes along to remind us.

                I don’t know why terrible things happen. I’m not even going to begin to try to understand or explain that. I do know however, that they compel us to evaluate our lives. Force us to remember what is important and realize what isn’t. Without dark we wouldn’t be able to recognize light. But even recognizing that light is sometimes difficult. Sometimes clarity is unclear. We realize that we’ve been asleep and now we’re awake, but as what to do with that knowledge we cannot begin to fathom. But maybe just being aware is enough. Being aware and moving forward. Thinking of Dumbledore as we turn on the light in the dark.