Tag: Living

Warfare, Home and the Journey

January 13, 2020 / Tom

“Life is warfare and a journey far from home.” ~Marcus Aurelius.

What do you think when you read this quote? Do you think of places you’d like to visit? Where is it you’d like to go?

In Stoic circles, many suggest that this quote was advising travel to faraway lands, while others say it is evidence that the Stoics were travelers who sought adventure. I wonder though, can it have a much more meaningful connotation, one that directs us more inward in our own journey?

To me, stoicism always been an inward process that radiates outward. I see much of philosophy as inward activity generating an outward expression. Stoicism has become the inward displaying itself in the outer world and is a catalyst for who I wish to be. It is not, for me, so much a way of life as it is a way to life.

As I see it, this quote seems to have more to do with inward warfare and that journey we all undertake to varying degrees. It has less to do with traveling to exotic locations and more to do with traveling inward to places I rarely go; those places that scare me yet seem to have such influence over my life.

To understand what I mean, let me start with the second part of the sentence.

“…and a journey far from home.”

What is home to most of us? It is a comfortable place where we feel secure. We can lock our doors and close our windows if need be. We can walk around our space naked without judgement. The choices we make are ours, and we can live in a way that pleases only us. It is our safe place.

Stoics seek balance and in that balance, home is a necessary space. Yet, as with any place of comfort, staying too long at home is a waste of living. While spending time under the blankets in bed is wonderful on a cold winter’s day, it ceases to be a healthy way of living if we stay there too long. We need the discomfort of getting out of bed into the cold, and we need the outdoors to truly feel alive.

That is what I believe Marcus meant with he said, “Life is…a journey far from home.”

Many of us search for those comfortable areas within. Some of us choose to stay there, often for too long. Inwardly speaking, life is a journey far from the comfortable spaces we’ve discovered. Life becomes, instead, the journey away from our comfort zones into the relative undiscovered and uncharted territory of what makes us uncomfortable.

I will rephrase one of my original questions to reflect that notion.

“Where is it you fear to go?”

When I answered that years ago, I also decided that is where I had to go if I wanted to heal and live my fullest life. That took much in the way of the first half of Marcus’ sentence. It took warfare.

“Life is warfare…”

Many will misconstrue Marcus’ meaning when they read the first half of this quote so, invariably, they will be led to the wrong location for the second half. I don’t see life as a inevitable war outside my mind, but I could certainly have experienced the persistent warfare within my mind. Now we may battle those external forces that wish to push us outside our safe space, but that is just the outward expression of the battle being waged within. My truth has always been that when someone pokes at my internal fears the demons always rise to fight. My reaction to those who challenge me is often the reaction my mind has to it’s own journey.

Fear, as most of us know, can be one helluva ruthless bastard. It’s likely why many of us shrink from even the idea of challenging it. Especially the biggest beasts who we’ve ignored with such skill that they often need not even awake to defeat us.

Yet, if we truly wish to live, we must engage in warfare to beat back the beasts that keep us locked in our homes. We must fight them, defeat them, so that we can journey deeper into ourselves. That journey is not only the expression of life but opens up the trail toward living. When we no longer fear going outside our safe spaces we can unlock the door and journey to places beyond.

If life is warfare and a journey far from home, then living is the prize of victory. There is always a difference between life and living and that difference is usually expressed in the balance we must fine. Living can be both the swaddling under warms blankets and it can be the warfare we engage in to enter a winter’s landscape. Balance is in finding the right times for either.

One Pane of Glass

November 26, 2019 / Tom

Outside, a blizzard rages. Inside, I am comfortable, nestled nicely on a sofa beside her warm body, watching the driven flakes of snow head to meet others that have fallen before them. There is but one pane of glass that separates me from the wilds out there. Just one pane of glass between the me found in this comfortable place and the me begging to be in the place that calls me.

The slow drum and dribbles of the washing machine fills this space, a rhythmic, modern tune hummed inside while the wild, ancient song of winter whips outside. Still, in this comfort and safety my mind wonders out there, to the place where deep snow has buried the earth, where the winter winds blow hard in autumn, where the parts of me that existed well before my flesh was formed once played. I can feel the discomfort of the cold air on my skin. I can feel the challenge of moving in deep snow. I can feel the desire for survival well up inside me. It is a fire I’ve known well, built in the moments of darkness where no light was assured, kindled in those times when I was frozen to the bone.

The wild part of me wants to be challenged. The hunter in me wants to stalk his prey. The hunted in me wants to dare the hunter out from behind his tree. The beast in me wants to prove I can survive. The coward in me wants to push the beast out of his cave. Nothing brings me to life like answering the call of the wild, and nothing says home to me like the wilds themselves.

I once believed I had surrendered to fear. That was a lie told by fear itself. I had but given myself pause to regroup so that I could move forward a little bit more. Sometimes victories are not measured in miles but in inches, and sometimes victory looks like defeat. Defeat cannot, however, stain the soul that moves past the fear within him. Defeat cannot pierce the heart of the warrior who stands firm against the onslaught of the demonic hoards born inside his mind.

I fear heights, so I’ve climbed tall ladders to protect my brothers facing fire below. I’ve feared death, so life brought me to its doorstep to show me a truth. I feared sharing myself with others, so I tore off my veils and became a naked warrior ready to just be me. More fear comes, and I challenge it, often discovering what I will do and won’t do now has little to do with fear, but more with desire. While I fear skydiving, I answer less to that fear and more to the fact that I simply have little desire to jump out of an airplane.

If that desire grows, I will jump with a wild yell. That truth I learned, the one I mentioned before, was that a fear of death is a fear of life. I choose life, living as fully as I can in any moment even in those times when victory looks exactly like defeat. I will not let panes of glass get in my way, instead honoring the oath sworn on my lifebed. I will splinter any walls that get in my way, and step over the shards of windows shattered in answering the calls within.

I wonder if there are others, those intrepid souls who hear the calls of life lived before this one, and answer with all the might their hearts can muster. I wonder if there are souls out there now trudging through the deepest snow just for the challenge of it. I wonder if there are warriors out there who hear the call of hunter and prey, beast and coward, sinner and saint simultaneously and who, like me, feel at home in the forests that echo those calls. I wonder if we speak one voice, hear one song, and peer at hope through the same, lonely pane of glass.

Life is what we are given as a promise of our birth. Love helps us overcome the obstacles to life we are blessed to have fallen across our path. Truth is what binds life and love to a single, simple calling. Find life, discover love. Discover love, know truth. Love life in truth and never die again. Even as your final breath is drawn, it is the one who has discovered life who can never truly die.

My Last Day on Earth (If Only I had the Courage)

October 9, 2019 / Tom

It’s almost become cliche. Actually, it has become cliche. We’ve turned a profound question of introspection into one that bounces off our exterior, often finding it hard to penetrate the wanton shrouds we place on our every day life. Still, though, the question remains a powerful one, even if it seems lost to the swirl of our common personal insanity.

What would I do if this is my last day on Earth?

I ask mys elf this question while sitting in a whirlpool of daily existence, head throbbing with the weight of the day on my shoulders.. This time, though, I want to answer it honestly and without reservation. I truly want to discover my long-hidden truth.

The first thing that I realize is that I would not be wasting time as I do. I would not give a fuck about my job, although I would still care about the people I serve. I would not care about the mundane things I give so much attention to. I waste so much of my life in the mundane, struggling to grasp at golden rings that always seem just beyond my reach. I spend much of my life threading water in a mundane pool of worry. There, I worry about what would happen if my car broke down, or I got sick, or if something happened to one of my beloveds. Perhaps knowing that this would be my last day on Earth would free me from such worries. Perhaps I’ve enshrouded my life with so many veils of worry that I can’t see what life is anymore. Perhaps my throbbing head offers me an answer.

Yet it seems I’ve started answering the question of what I would do by suggesting what I wouldn’t do. That seems to be because I spend so much of my time doing things I would not do if faced with the end. Perhaps there is a sapling rose in the weed-filled garden of my life, a garden that I first must weed just to get to the flower. Maybe there is so much shit in my way that a clearing is necessary. It’s time, perhaps, to burn the fucking thing to ash just to clear out the trash. Maybe that is what my response is telling me. End the patterns that have never served you well, and let those that do bloom in their sacred majesty. Let me now pull out the most easily pulled weeds in my garden.

So, I would not be sitting at this desk wishing I was on a trail somewhere. I would not be looking out this window at the gorgeous blue skies wishing I was under them unimpeded by the glass, wood and nails of the box I am in. I would not be sitting alone wishing those I love were near, sharing in the glory of the moments we share alive and in health. I would not be asking myself questions the betray the misery of American human existence. I would not need to learn, or teach, or ask for the truth. I would just live, and life itself would be my teacher, my instruction and my honest breath.

I would be making love in the mud, dancing in the rain, searching for the rose in the weeds. I would be laughing an honest laugh and walking the hardest trail. I would hold your hand with all the vitality of a man in love with his mortality can muster. I would hold your face and kiss you with the knowledge that I don’t have many of those left, and I would cherish that kiss with all the attention it deserved. I would hug those I love with a heart wide open, and they would return the love because they, too, realize the frailty of our interaction. I would bask in such glory, having found heaven in my midst and hell in knowing I would be leaving it all behind.

I would write my book without the distraction that lives outside my soul. The words themselves would shout with the exuberance of a wild beast in his element, and they would shake your heart to its core. You would feel a pulsing in areas that may have been long-dormant and I would quake with you in an ecstasy of connection. You would tingle, and I would dance, and that majesty would wake up the world to a truth we’ve often left lost in the madness of our distraction. That rose would bloom in being free from the weeds. Free to bask in the sun of its day and the moon of its night.

If only I had the courage.

This morning there was such a sweet meditation. I was walking in a beautiful and lush valley, teaming with life and basking both in the light of the Sun and the shadows created by a ring of high mountains. I loved the way I felt in the valley, allowing the chill of the shadow to give the warmth of the light its meaning. My fingertips draw funny shapes in the dew that clings to the large leaves, and my eyes close in a silent prayer as nature plays around me. I can hear a distant waterfall mixing with the rush of a spring stream and I wonder if there is anything else I could want.

Those mountains. Their peaks begin calling out to me with a siren’s song, That is where I need to be. My heart pleads for me to go, but my feet sit idle. My soul screams at me to move, yet my mind stays still. All of me wants to sit on their summit, all but the part of me that needs to make it happen. That part of me holds firm to what it knows, what it was taught, lost in the fear of what lies just beyond. I am sure the view is beautiful. I am sure the climb is majestic. I am sure that the thought of moving scares the shit out of me.

My god, if I only had the courage.

I am awakened from this vision. Swirling in that brew created with parts of thought, parts of soul, and parts of heart is a stew meant for great consideration. Perhaps there would be no fear if this was my last day on earth. Perhaps the views would worth my final breath. Perhaps the climb would be worth each drop of sweat left in me. Maybe I could rise from this valley I feel stuck in if only I had no repercussions to face. Then I wonder what the repercussions would be if I stayed and failed to climb the mountains that promised at least a view of the promised land.

Now, however, I have no time to think about such things. I have to get to work, to meet my responsibilities. I have to bathe in mundane waters that keep the trail dust from settling on my skin. I have to hide in this box telling the world that “I am just like you” while knowing I am not like them at all. I have to lie just to find the truth, and I have to reconcile my wild nature with rules I had no hand in creating. If only I had the courage I’d have if I knew this was my last day on Earth. If only I could move.