What is the POINT?
I had a hard time letting go of the question, "But what is the POINT?"
There is no point.
Life just is, and we can choose to learn lessons from what has occured, however pleasantly or abbhorently unbelievable.
Life just is, and we're just here recording it all in wonder.
If you aren't, I at least am, and have been the last couple decades of my life on this Earth.
From a small little town in Northeast Ohio that most people have never heard of, there wasn't much to do as an only child in a small white-sided house a few lots down from a busy interstate.
I read a lot of books and took a lot of notes, wrote a bunch of short stories about what it might have been like to have a lot of brothers and sisters, and recorded my most ridiculous thoughts, whims, dreams, and other happenstances that I always suspected an older version of myself would want someday.
Unquestionably, I have wanted to be a writer since at least the second grade.
I dreamed of my portrait on the back of a published book and wondered what my biography would say.
Who would I grow up to be?
What would I have accomplished?
What would life bring?
Like the start of a blank new journal: whatever would fill between the cover pages?
How would my book make people FEEL?
How would they be changed when they closed the book?
The ending couldn't suck or they'd hate me, and the work in its entirety couldn't suck or I'd hate myself... so for years I studied the work of others, took notes, wrote and wrote and wrote thousands of documents in private, and wondered when I would ever get the guts to publish my own work.
Toni Morrison
In the spirit of so many other prolific Ohioans, here I am.
To risk showing someone my most vulnerable self and risk them (and get real, in this industry, almost EXPECT) them to reject me.
Not me as a Social Media Manager, Digital Marketing Specialist, or Webmaster.
Who CARES?!
That is a self-made and highly lucrative stream of revenue I am grateful for discovering upon graduating in the worst economy since the Great Depression with a liberal arts degree in Women's Studies and minors in Studio Art and English.
I'm grateful for this decade+ career for somehow magically keeping me financially afloat.
Not even do I care daring me as a 500 RYT, E-200 RYT, Meditation Teacher, iRest Yoga Nidra Level 1 + 2 Teacher...
All of these other professional certifications are awesome and I appreciate them immensely, but ultimately: they were and remain tools.
As an entrepreneur too stubborn to give up the last eleven years of my life, I have somehow forged a path for myself that is at once pretty ecclectic in comparison to most, but in this day and age... a collaboration and network of many.
A solopreneur joyously interconnected to other kind, wise, and compassionate business owners and leaders in Columbus, Ohio and beyond.
I am a lot of things, but all of these things were strongly pursued in an effort to pursue the grandest dream of all for me: to be an author.
I think that was the real emotional block for me, the real fear, the real reason I jumped out of an airplane: I am an extremely reserved and pretty private "public figure" for the most part.
I am out and about in public on a weekly basis as a teacher, interacting with others interacting with corporate America and beyond, live society at large.
I always loved to read because of the connection--somehow, these writers were total strangers but I felt I knew them so intricately.
They offered a peak behind the curatins of their minds: their opinions, their experiences, their perspectives, their insecurities, their vulnerabilies, their imperfections--sometimes even their sorrows and horrors and joy, too.
Growing up on the outskirts of a small country town in Northeast Ohio... books offered me the ability to understand that my feelings sometimes of being (unknownligly then) a very iconoclastic member of my small (minded) community.... rejected, sad, angry, hopeless, dismal...
I was okay being an outsider and somehow even used it to my advantage.
Books were undoubtedly my way out.
They helped me learn from the huge mistakes of others and FEEL the consequences of their actions.
I almost exclusively read fantasy and fiction, now a teacher adept in biology, anatony, nueroscienct, facts, nonfiction, and textbooks...
The fantasy of the still unknown cosmos is enough to spark the same wonder.
The idea of multiple universes, realms, realities we are so many centuries from fully understanding...
Is this not enough wonder?
Is there not enough to awe upon our very real globe?
I read about MLK who had a twitch in his eye every time he spoke.
A stutter.
I have the same little block, or had it.
It was a fear of being all I am because I so feared the conseuqneces would be as severe as they were for my greatest heroes.
When MLK was ready to face that he could die, he relaxed.
In the same way, I am ready to die for my purpose: to connect human beings of all races, nationalites, religions, to truly teach what it means to be UNITED and in HARMONY.
All I can offer is theory and a few hypothetical musings, some examples of what I tried in purpose and the results of these social experiments.
I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
Let's do this, Walt.
Wink.
It boils down to: why does this life matter? What do we we do with it while we're here?
What's the point of any of our passions or pursuits?
We're all leading the same inevitable end…
That could seem incredibly dismal to you, or perhaps provide a jolt of inspiration.
The funny observation that it is often the devoutly religious who refuse to confront the diea (the reality) of death… why?
Those open to truth, whatever it turns out to be (Carl Sagan) don't seem to be nearly as opposed to looking at the idea of death square in the face.
This will happen to all living beings eventually. What is to fear? Face the reality?
From a small town in rural Ohio, it strikes me as odd that so many Christians and Catholics with such certainty and pletntitudes of stories about what happens after death are so anxious about this topic. See Alan Watts quotes.
Might they not be so certain? Or are deep seated doubts arising about which extreme they may face?
Invariably not perfect, born to be sinners, does it boil down to the fear of not knowing if God will welcome you to heaven for an eternity of blissful reunions with your friends and previously deceased loved ones?
I might be afraid too if I was taught to believe in a potential afterlife full of hell and eternal torture.
To speak ill of religion, or better yet, to question any aspect of it is taboo… but from a Catholic lineage I have long questioned and the real life epicdemic of raping and abusing a wide array of helpless children… come on.
Come on, for fuck's sake.
WAKE UP.
Not likely.
This is better shown in a novel with subtletie than written about in an angry, accusatory essay. Surely.
