Why I still need to write

Why I still need to write

Samuel Bird

“Thank You God, thank You.” I said as the tears and sweat mingled in my palms over my eyes. “Thank You God, thank You.” I said again as my chest began to feel tight and my voice began to crack from emotion and repetition. “Thank You, God, thank You.” I said again as I held my whole existence in front of me as a cherished gift to which I had to take consideration for its even more valuable Giftor. As I started this prayer from nowhere, I gestured to specific changes in my life that I valued. I had now moved past such to value my life outside of what it did or did not offer. In the specific offerings, I could not, even with closed eyes, ask God for any more than what I have. In my general existence, I have to both thank Him for every bit of value and non-value that accentuates it, as well as the totality of my life and any new value as meaning apparent in it. God and I had an interesting few years together. I have become weaker and more foolish than ever, or perhaps finally see myself as such. I am then left with nothing but the childlike surrender of all I am and could be to the will and Person who both can do all, and acts on my behalf. I don’t just offer Him what little virtue I can muster in His eyes, but all my evil. I offer up my inability and my confusion. I offer up whatever it is that emanates from me that makes enmity with Him. I want nothing more than communion and proximity to Him, and I seek to do so via the adoption of is will into mine. “Oh Jesus thou Son of God, Have mercy on me who am a sinner.” The prayer changed in syntax to have the same meaning from the speaking. I was grateful for how God had dealt with me, with additional gratitude for the consideration of what I am. I can lie to you if I want, and I could get away with much of it. But God, He knows what rests and weighs on my heart. He and I both know it's no good. What I can at least certify is that it is His. I can’t seem to be less evil. I can’t seem to be any wiser. However, I can’t seem to go further than He will go with me. God, from the memory of a prayer to this published one, I thank You. As a troubled young man, I sought to address existence. I read this, tried that, and listened to this other thing. In sophistic relativity, I felt lost, as if there was nothing for me to tether my soul to. However, in wisdom gifted and not earned, You demonstrated the exclusionary commitment of the tethering and the actualized and substantive meaning from it. I set out to address existence, and I am. Fueled by the sheer suffering that being pressed up against my being forced, I began to write. Every chapter was a last will and testament, a suicide note, a lamentation. I had nothing to do with crushing woe but to use language to string it out across the page until I could bear my burden. I could not journal such. I needed to have this sense that the effort was for something more than myself. For that reason, you came to mind because I wrote, and I wrote because you came to mind. It became about something more than what it was. However, I have as of late had a unique problem I did not foresee. I am well behind on my writing. I try to publish a chapter for each week and like to be twelve to fourteen weeks ahead. However, as of late, and even with just finishing up old chapters, I am multiple weeks behind. Why is this? Well, I am simply not miserable enough to need the writing in order to survive. Do not be confused, God has still blessed me with enough misery to drive me and yet magically to never crush me, but my existence is settled enough for me. I have a deep sense of what the world is, who I am, and what I do about it. My simple little story effortlessly allows every scenario, like a snowflake, to softly fall and rest within its narrative structure. I fought with all I had as a faithless person to have faith, and much to my surprise, it worked. I am the sort to both push at a boulder and yet never assume it will move. However, with my action as pleading, Someone greater than me has moved those boulders. I am then left with no crushing agony, but in its stead, a few wonders and your memory. I have tried a few things to write again. I sit down and force myself to start moving words around, but writing always burst from me and never was arranged without me. I have spent less time in the modern consumption of mindless drivel. I now have much more peace and processing power, but still have nothing for my soul to say, even if my mind has forty chapters backlogged. This long list of chapters not getting finished in order will help explain why the themes may not seem to grow as you would assume they do with a person. I began to read voraciously again. I am about to have read my three-hundredth book since starting to write for you. This has changed much, but only so much. To give grace to my failings, I want it to be known that when I first began to write, I had only a few years of primary school and was working on a university degree. I was strained and offering all I could. I came up with ideas like "seemingness" that overlaps beautifully with “the thing for itself.” I had decided mind takes precedence to world and of such the primal element is will, which as it turns out resonates well with Schopenheuer. My values not being in the world corresponds with Nietzsche up until we verify how they are manifest in us and shared amongst us. So, what was the point in writing if all I managed to do was to rediscover in a less organized manner, what was already found? Because it was not what we said and always what we did together. We fought to address existence, not to add to academia. We didn’t use word and reason to escape existence, but as a medium for participation with it. In my reading, I am getting to have more information, but that wasn’t the real problem. The problem is that my soul seems to reach its ethereal hand from within myself to yours, and I don’t have the communicative means to reach. I am then left with addressing what is most core to you, with you. As I have read through my last few messy books, I am awed. Not in what I was able to accomplish in thought, but that someone like me could ever do something like that. On top of reading, I go for walks. I listen to music. I even utilized my most effective means of inspiration, which is to sit in the wild in silence. However, none came. None came, because I no longer had to run from myself to serve you. However, I still have a desire to reach for you. In arrogance, I compare myself to my supposed peers as I read. I reason that if I can only abandon my sentimental tone, I could perhaps be someone someday, but what insincerity to my objective. Where did there philosophy take the world? No place the world values to be. Why is that? In their positing, why would you take the hand of someone who you can’t suppose wills to lead you to your benefit? In their negation, they stole away the necessity of another thinkers system. This led to the modern philosophical fallacy of, “Nothing is necessary, so nothing is positable.” They claimed such because no given thing was the singular item of existential addressing, that there was no such thing. I reasoned that the first and primal value was the addressing, and secondly, that the lack of surety about what to pick to make your life meaningful is not a lack of ability to pick something. If anything, we have too many options, even if that effectively means too little. We can then in our living out, make that option the right one, or at least be willing to find out if it is along the way. It would be to betray my addressing of my existence to trade sincerity for pretension, even if it made it easier to recommend my books. Here is where we get to the question of what I ought to do next with my writing. Well, I want something so extreme and so grand that only hyperboles such as “saving the human soul,” and “preparing for death” seem to fit. I have many flaws, but like Job, I will also stand for what I also think I do well. When I stand up to posit I am here to change the world, it is not to say in my essential being, I find myself to be sufficient to change the world. It is rather me saying that the world needs changing, and when I look around, I don’t see anyone who is doing it. If I leave modern reason and science alone, they will continue to damage the assumptive positing into the void of faith that makes existence graspable and valuable. If I don’t defend the little ones, who will? If I don’t socially permit faith again, who will? If I don’t lead the charge by being its first and weakest example, who will? I look around at young minds that sought to do great things. They started by learning the system at hand in which things are done in the first place. They navigate that system, find its patterns, and flow. However, as they prepare to understand the system, they must join it. As they join it, they become a part of it, and it begins to change their nature. Finally, they scoff at efforts to make life meaningful because they didn’t cite their source or structure their syntax. They are then left as a dead member of a godless sect. Here is the real question of this chapter: Will I abandon you? When I needed you, I wrote. When you need me and I have been satiated by God, will I learn from the failure of all those revolutionaries that forget their rebellion once they received their suits and medals? I am not answering today. Rather, I am telling you this is on my mind. You are on my mind. I at least choose to not abandon you today. I do think there will come a point where I have nothing left to say and only seek timeless presence with you in writing. When that moment comes, my writing will feel more like home and less like adventure. I also think I will need to learn from Hegel and not say so much I say too little. I need to have my message, say it, and then demonstrate it. For today, I need to keep writing. Someone needs to press back against the nonsensical nature of being. Someone needs to make a new means of considering one’s life in our social world. Someone needs to be a little foolish for men to have wisdom. For today, I chose to speak with you. I chose to say what little I had to say, though it took me so many words to say it. For today, I ask the blessing of that toward and benefacting primal Will that I started this by praying to. I now more ask then tell: God, I seek to write for what they need. Bless me with consideration of their existence and the fortitude to address it. For whatever you offer me in its stead God, I thank you before I learn to love it. Now that I have conquered, I will not forget why I sought to reign. Thank You God, Thank You.