We make the world what it is.

Having honed myself to the role of a very individualistic girl shut in the mental tower of her own making, I had the impression that taking leaps of faith is something akin to flinging myself from a high window. Little did I know that it would be like crawling out of the rabbit hole after living in my inner Wonderland for most of my life, instead.

I knew there was a reason I was far more fond of Dante than Shakespeare, that I take pleasure in the religious aspects of any story I read, and that philosophical texts only appeal to me when it agrees with my faith in humanity. It’s because I am a snob, contemptuously irreverent, and a skeptic who isn’t inclined to believe in other people. I think there’s joy to be found in being humbled every time I read something significant to my life. Even though I’ve always seen humility from the perspective of falling into the sin of pride, there’s so many more other ways to be humbled by one’s imagination that is free from human arrogance and ambition. The added benefit of laughing at something meaningful is that you get to learn to laugh at yourself as well.

Things that genuinely delight me are usually the things that don’t trigger my bad habit of being morbidly obsessive. I am too hard on my weaknesses and failures, but I treasure my uptake on wit and humor because it’s refreshingly freeing to indulge the aspect of myself that always knows the good reasons to anything. My appreciation of good humor is an ability that my self-critic can’t win against. If the joke was given enough care that it doesn’t hurt anyone, I only have to experience other people’s intelligence touching my funny bone. Being so serious and depressive that I am compulsively forced to search for meaningless things to amuse myself, it’s very humbling when I am to be won over by others’ preeminence in sharing their gift for humor, and I do so love being a gratefully happy audience.

Knowing that I can appreciate wit but cannot wield it, my humility is such that I don’t find it in myself to feel envy for other people’s gift for humor. Entertainment in itself is a concept that makes me think of the poem Laughter and Death, and Jars of Clay’s song Sad Clown. Yet I think the ability to appreciate humor comes from positive perception. Irony can only be satisfyingly relished if one believes in a world that’s entirely random and relative, and it’s stuff of good drama but not upliftingly affective. There’s only meaning in hope if it can’t be mocked.

We often don’t know it, but we often only look at things that makes us angry, despairing, fearful and shocked, because the media in the world usually holds such things to light for its entertainment value. These things end up alienating us from humanity, and from each other, like bad jokes often do. Humor should serve to help us see life’s colorful connections, and connect us to each other for the common desire for fun. For all our continuous search for happiness, we don’t remember to ask ourselves where happiness comes from in the first place. How would we know which direction to go if we can’t even see the Source of true delight?

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Having previously set Robert Frost’s Bond and Free as the poem for my life, I am struck by Khalil Gibran’s Your Thought and Mine, which I haven’t read before, as an answer to any personal philosophies I have. I think I need to see myself in a new light given the latter poem.

When one is rich in thought, it’s just as hard to let go of the thoughts you treasure. But the mind should grow as well, and not just in capacity of content. Too much freedom in thought has its own faults, which is a hard lesson learned, but I don’t regret coming from that wide open point of view, because they prompt me to think outside the box and end up seeing things in new ways. Where I used to see restriction, I now see certain graces that I could never attain for all my sense of self-determination through thought. Extreme individualism has its own dangers of mindlessness, like negativism, relativism, neo-paganism, aestheticism and puritanism (yes, that last is quite possible, and is a bad thing in the long run). 

It’s all right then to aim for the stars in our thoughts, but let love be the driving force of our actions, even if it has us putting on our own chains. Because I see now that being held down by the demands of love offers its own kind of freedom, and that is the freedom from regrets.