Surviving Life

What will I say at the end of the day?  What will I be able to?  I watched TV and I relaxed—these things they tell me are essential parts of life.  They’re part of living.  Human beings, out of fear, assume they’re better where they are than where they could be.  They reason—rationalize.  In the end, nowhere is good.  Nowhere is it free.  We tend to say in some form, “When we’re free of this, I’ll be that.”  But it isn’t true.  We can’t be happy with this and we can’t be happy with that.  Human beings are not intended—built for happiness.  There’s too much pain to endure, too much hope and too much dissatisfaction.  Our goals are illusive.  It’s only through loss that we ever feel relief.  That’s why we find ourselves repeating the same destructive patterns, even as we struggle to overcome those patterns.  As painful to us as our actions are, we do them because we find relief—not in the familiarity of the situation, as is often suggested, but in the self-affirmation we gain from surviving it.