I’ve been embroiled in a great number of useless and ultimately futile endeavors in my time. I’ve fought tooth and nail for things that most people would regard as little more than a pittance. Most that knew me in the more hot headed days of my youth would agree that I had a very short temper and was quick to react with raw emotion should the situation prove to me that it was merited. In all I can’t deny that I’ve let my passion consume me more than once, but I’d be lying if I said the things I battled for hadn’t meant something deep and immeasurable to me. I fought ravenously to have others in my life accept my choices regarding Nicole, and fought even harder to make her mine. Sadly I failed in both regards, but as Malcolm Reynolds says, “I was on the losing side, still not convinced it was the wrong one.”
I’ve fought to control my emotions for my family as we’ve stared death in the face more times than I’d care to count. All of my fights have been for something personal, cost me greatly, and most I’ve not come out holding any great riches or fame from. But despite the petty squabbles, the quarrels that ultimately amount to little more than pissing contests, one thing remains constant. The things we fight for mean something to us. They drive us, they fill us, and they compel us to great things and remarkable deeds. But what is the universal constant that unites me with you? Love. Almost everything we do, we do because of some feeling of love. Compassion, sympathy, protection, or just a feeling of safety and connection drive us to do the things we would otherwise feel unable or unwilling to.
I’d be lying if I said that that the vast majority of the things I’ve done in my life that could be seen as redeeming have not been for love. As a Scorpio I love a bit more expressively and more deeply than most others allow themselves to. I have felt the pangs of joy and completion holding my special someone in my arms. I have felt the gaping expanse of nothingness that needles at my mind when I’m without her. I have been overwhelmed by a single kiss and left to contemplate how someone seen as so strong in the face of unfathomable adversity can be brought to his knees with such a simple and common action. I have seen love, the essence of it, not the feeling itself, but the universal constant, as immutable as gravity or the sensation of experience, and I have seen the beauty behind her eyes. Let me tell you that as skilled as I am in being able to construct prose, I falter immeasurably when I attempt to truly describe exactly what I’ve seen.
A loud and raucous cacophony of emotion, truth and beauty mixed together in a maelstrom of chaos and anarchy that comes through as a whisper of perfection. The eyes are the gateway to the soul and I have stared deeply at a few, but none as deeply as I did at hers. To actually see into someone, to look at them see no secrets, no pretense, nothing hidden or veiled, to see the naked uninhibited truth of a person is a life changing experience. I stared into her eyes and what I felt, what I saw, all of it cobbled together, and meshed in an endless and complex web of unending and absolute truth, it is a beauty most will never know. All of that came and went, I saw it the first month of knowing her, and it impelled me to rise to heights of personal excellence I thought beyond me. But I found resolve and strength I thought out of my reach and spent the next two years fighting, sacrificing, and agonizing in a seemingly endless sea of want and need. And while the final chapter to that saga has been written, the outcome purposed completely by the fates and as unarguable as fire consumes all it touches; I came out of it with a greater sense of understanding and a better sense of myself.
All of that energy could be seen to have been wasted, or as little more than an exercise in futility. But it emboldened me. So now I’m left knowing exactly what I was once willing and ready to give all of myself for. I know my limits and my capabilities, and I’m left wondering, and questioning what else is really worth fighting for.
Cosmic balance is a concept I originated some four years ago and counting, and at the time it seemed a worthwhile explanation for all of the trauma I’d been subjected to in life that didn’t involve the normal decrying of a god that is more than likely no more malicious than a small child wanting to be left to his own devices. I wrote a book based on the concept and I’m still in the final stages of getting that off and out, but the concept itself seems universal and unifying. This could all be seen as just another trial to bring happiness into the world, another grand machination by the Fates to maintain the fragile balance of the cosmos. So with my appetite for retribution and vengeance so ravenous in the past, why does my hand stay in this instance? Is it evolution or maturity that gives me pause? Or simply the realization that order will be maintained by the ethereal forces of the universe by way of natural progression seeing fit to poetically punish those that sought to make me a victim of their delusions and psychosis?
I’m sure this post seems a bit harried in the sense that it draws parallels to my love life with my thirst for revenge, but the heart of the matter is that the things we care about most, people, places, things, or ideas, push us to do things or act in ways we would not ordinarily even contemplate. Sometimes that push is in a positive direction, for the better, and sometimes it’s in a darker more shrouded place where few dare to spend any time at all. But ultimately we need to acknowledge that the things in life we hold dearest, care most about, or effect the deepest are the things that make us who we are and determine our course in life. The only thing in life worth fighting for isn’t ideology, religion, land, resources, or territory on some map because none of that matters. Not the deadlines, the phone calls, the meetings, the text messages, the Facebook updates, or the forum flames; all of it is little more than idle minutia to fill the day until we get back to what really matters, the only thing that is ever worth giving a damn about: love.
