The Hope for a Dream
To write, to see, to know. Stream of consciousness. What is there to see—what is there to know? Simple observations of the day, filtered through mood, emotion, and perception. We observe, we filter, we process, we perceive - all of which we turn into experience, and all within split seconds. Creation’s capacity to process and react is quite miraculous. To sit in silence and perceive thoughts. I sit here now, listening to a cacophony of white noise: the refrigerator’s hum in the next room, the birds chirping outside my north facing window, planes flying in orderly sequence along their air runway above my small Queens apartment, and the frequent sirens and horns inherent to an urban diaspora. This is my life. This is a slice of New York City. Quiet and stillness are in themselves uncomfortable, but even more so are they here; jarring almost. Because everyday is filled with people, sounds, and every kind of pressure. Thousands of people pass on a commute; bumping shoulders, avoiding eye contact, ascending and descending the stairs of a transit system built more than 100 years ago.
And that’s an interesting thought in itself. How many people have gone before us; living, working, dying--Even with every day-to-day pressure and responsibility, we still share humanity’s inevitable call to live, work, and die. It’s a strange irony that we seem to fight so earnestly to justify our existence - our importance, while most of our stories will be lost to the anvils of time. This is not to say however that lives are meaningless - far from it! Could we imagine not enjoying the luxuries of infrastructure, technology or cuisine; developed, created, and built on the shoulders of human accomplishment? By no means. But the thought is simply to remind us of the limits of self-importance. We are good and kind, simply because it is the right thing to do in light of humanity’s sojourn of living, working, and dying. Not one escapes this fate. And truly, not a fate that should be feared or resisted. For it is in these inglorious moments of living, working, and dying that life happens; the good, the bad, and the f**ked up.
So much of daily messaging centers around making a mark on this world. Self-improving this, branding yourself that, creating this or that message, presenting yourself in such and such a light. The pressures are shocking. The desire is good, but the sucking, consuming nature of it all can shirk life - shirk precious moments. We either work too hard, or not enough.We feel the weight of any number of indelible pressures, both from within and without. Living in the past, or living in the future, but rarely in the present.
To be sure, we seek balance in our aspirations, our time, and our relationships. Some of us are a-type rapid fire achievers, others, relaxed, sociable b-types, but most of us are somewhere in-between. We hope, we dream, we beg, but everyone has a story. And stories are worth telling, because they remind us that our experience is not uncommon. They remind us to be kind to ourselves on this imperfect sojourn called life. It is the, “you too?!” of experience that transforms strangers into friends.
We seek not to make a point or to forward an agenda with this blog, but simply to create space to tell real, honest, vulnerable stories of experience. To share thoughts of life revealing the glorious in the inglorious.
And it is our hope that many “you too?!” moments will be shared, and that all of us will be encouraged by the commonality of experience.
