Childish Things. I find myself today thinking of childish things. I used to know everything. I cannot put a finger on when it was that I knew so much. My mind or the muse that sometimes whispers to me says it was when I was twenty-two. Maybe. It must have been around that time that I topped Pompous Mountain.
I know far less now. I know well that by the time I was twenty-four, everything that I believed I had known with such certainty had become suspect.
I remember coming apart. Everything looked fine on the outside, or close to it. But I was coming apart. At least a few people who knew me and loved me could see it and held onto me in whatever ways they could. I am grateful for them.
Maybe it was around this time that I first began to see that the world was broken and that I could not fix it. Maybe I was discovering that I was broken and that my best attempts to make necessary improvements did not amount to much. I am sure it sounds depressing. It was depressing.
I see now that while none of us can make everything better, we can each make some things better. Let me walk through each day I am given doing so.
I fool myself when I look back wistfully as though I could travel back and tell myself this or that thing which my today-self believes would have made all the difference. To think such things is a self-deception. And even could I do such a thing, to not have endured whatever was to me painful in that day would have left me without the gifts of knowledge and wisdom that are mine on this far side of the experience.
I find myself today in a place where I am deeply grateful to be me. I remain quite broken, but I hope that I love and share kindness better for my trip so far. Some days I feel like a failure. Some days I feel like a well-kept secret. Every day I am both hopeful and expectant for the view and the fellowship I will know atop and beyond the next hill.
Be encouraged.
And for what it’s worth, from further up and further on, I looked back to see that Pompous Mountain was only a small hill; lonely, barren. A rise just tall enough from which to take a good fall. If you can, skip it.