July 21, 2019 - Trial

Fickle humans.  Always wanting what they haven’t got.  “If only it were cooler outside as I cannot bear this heat!”  Yet just a few months ago, how they screamed for the sun.  “This insufferable, cold rain gets right into your bones!”  Yet a few months before then, how they longed for a sign of spring instead of the frozen wasteland in which they dwelled.  “This icy land of death wearies my soul!”  Yet just a few months before that, they’d had enough of the grayness of the late fall.  “There’s no greenery left, and at least winter gives us a lovely white blanket!”

And on and on it goes.  “Give me what I want because I don’t really want it!”  None of it works out as they had hoped and planned.  None of it is what they had remembered it to be.  None of it is nearly as desirable after having attained it.  “But don’t you know that I don’t really want what I want?  How can you be so callous?!”  They confuse their desire for the future with the fantasy of their past.

It is the journey they pine for, not the destination, but very few of them know this.  It is the striving, the trial, the fighting that defines them, not the attainment of the goal.  The goal is all very fine and well, of course, but it is the courage, the cunning, and the strength to get it that builds up the human mind, body, and spirit.  It is the perpetual “becoming” man longs for.  This struggle is what makes life worth living.  Not to struggle is to die.

A frog sits in the cool pond—knee deep, knee deep, knee deep, he sings.  Perhaps he will hop.  Perhaps not.  It is enough to be in the cool pond.  Let the dead bury the dead, he thinks to himself, as he blends in and becomes the world around him, resting under a blade of grass.  He does not put the head of his living god onto the skeleton shoulders of the past.

But he is just a frog.