I am in a moment that no one can define.

It is so easy to say “it’s always been like this,” and just as that seems correct on the surface, it’s never been like this. Because we know too much. We’ve seen too much to let what is happening all around us continue without interference or cataclysm. 

Most days I wake up with a deep sorrow. It’s hard to discern if the sorrow is due to circumstances in my own life—it’s always easy to get caught up in these thoughts—or if the circumstances of the external world being as they are bring me to wondering what my place in it is. Why I am here now. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this question, for what feels like a long time now. I mean in a directed fashion, not idly, not as background noise that I can ignore while I go do other things. It is a thrum, a definite pulsing sound that never leaves me. It is always there. Not at the edges; in the middle, too. 

The sorrow is because I do not have an answer. I’m not “living the questions,” as Rilke once wrote. The questions are too large; they may not be answerable in a single lifetime. The sorrow is the realization that my life is insufficient. Oddly this is freeing in a strange way. The minute you stop worrying about making a difference—about anything that you do ever mattering—it frees you. You simply do what you are doing, because the impulse resides within you. Doesn’t matter what the impulse is, or what you call it to yourself. It’s not self-ish; that’s a judgement imposed by others. It’s self direction; the compass that lives within us finally becomes what we guide ourselves by. Not the voices of others, not their values or morals or disdain. Just that arrow within that points us where we need to go, where we are drawn to go.

I learned many decades ago that in the middle of deep despair can be found the most incredible joy. Moments that you keep for years, isolated as they are by the conditions around them. Endless joy is a monotone that takes brightness and remembrance out of it. Renders it in tones of beige that don’t inspire one to hold on. Endless despair can be that, too. 

Joy is a light in the dark. A spark. We exist to flash these sparks at one another.