Monday, June 12, 2006 // 1:25 AM

laundry day

i love the smell of clean laundry, just tumbled out of the washing machine after 40 litres of soap water, 6 rinses and 12 minutes of spinning. i spent about ten minutes hanging up that one load of laundry cos i couldn't resist the urge to stick my face into each piece and inhale deeply. it makes me so unreasonably happy.

doing housework is some incredibly therapeutic, with its mindlessness, with its easy-come sense of achievement. maybe i'm only saying this because i'm not really being forced to do all this, overtime, pushing my body to the limit of exhaustion, juggling a hundred other concerns and commitments at the same time. or because i am not like a house-wife who has to do it for a whole bunch of people and everyday. but it has a happy straightforwardness, everytime i start to think about the studying that i haven't done, the studying i am going to have to do, i come home and can believe that my biggest problems aren't my block tests or a levels or even the million and one issues that i have with myself. but instead, a load of harmless laundry, docile dishes waiting to be washed.

i'm cleaned up behind myself, i'm leaving everything in good shape, before going off for church camp. i like how simple my world is now, the hanging out with people who don't mean the entire world to me, the gorgeous rain and piano playing, all my holiday fixes. holiday means i get enough therapy to not hurt for it, holiday means space enough to breathe, to sit down and let go of myself. holiday means i can think about the major things, the things that matter, without their getting edged out by the urgent-unimportant. holiday means speed, so much speed that you don't have much time to think too much, if you don't want to, but holiday means slowness, slowness enough to listen to a song, to take a long bus-ride, to sit around and look at the sky. today the rain made me insanely happy, the rain and the company and the guitar playing in the background, and lunch, and five stolen minutes of a good song on the piano. and all the unaccounted silliness which i have missed.

God

(Friday, 9 June 2006)

i don't know how i feel. i have a taste of it, a taste of what i want to be, again, i have a vision and a purpose and a point to getting up everyday. but somewhere in the back of my mind i'm so endlessly jaded, and yet again i'm trying to fight it, i'm calling you satan, i'm acknowledging something i'm really quite afraid, to admit, for a couple of reasons.

some part of me still doesn't want to take up this identity of being a christian. because it looks silly, when i look at it with my secular eyes, because my secular self, amoral and a lot of other things, is very much the path of least resistance. the most natural thing for me to be. if there is no God, don't talk to me about being a nice person, really, it isn't something that i naturally am. and i've been trying to make christianity a part of me that is sheflable, trying to do this religion thing without letting it engulf my value systems, my life. is this something we all do, to some extent, in one way or another, i do think so. but i think some part of me has known all along what i have been doing, and i have been less than honest with myself because in classic fashion i have wanted to be in control, and i am not ready to give up this habit, this convenience, this crutch of being a christian. for social and emotional and all sorts of other reasons. and so i've played a hypocrite's card, and so i've done the whole if-i-ignore-it thing again, and wandered down an entirely different path of living and thinking and being, while setting up this cardboard cut-out of myself in my old place, so that as and when i want to come back to it, i can. who am i fooling, i don't think i am fooling God. i might be fooling everyone, though, certainly i've been swell at fooling myself. and now, really, i don't know where i stand. or rather, right now right now i do, but i'm just so unhopeful of fighting against time's ability to change my mind, about my ability to stay at this place of certainty for very long. hello, secular world, you are my entire life: the studies and the people and the ideas and the remedies to life's disease. i have bought into your philosophies. said philosophies, i don't think they're working for me, but somehow i always tell myself that that is my fault and that if i tried again, if i do it right, i might some day suceed in reaching happiness by that path. secular philosophy is incredibly frustrating but that doesn't mean that i can give them up, or want to, even. i think some part of me will still try to work things out in secular terms, without God in the picture, because reality to me just seems to include God less and less, because the secular world, everything that is not God, is really just so overwhelming. by sheer volume, by sheer seduction, by sheer sense, some times. hello world, how can i ignore you? to be in the world but not of the world looks to me some incredibly impossible, and the thought of that makes me want to throw in the towel and give up the fight. like i have done before, like i know we all do, at some point of time.

so what have i been doing, this past few _______, all i recall is feeling a lot of tiredness, a lot of pointlessness, a lot of loneliness. a lot of wanting to fly away, a lot of cynicism and little, if any, hope about anything at all, don't even talk about God or not God. i don't think i want to live like this, but some part of me just thinks that's life get used to it. is it naive of me to say no i refuse to, i refuse to get used to it? because what you accept you embrace and you aid in its coming true. but all the hope in the world won't change what reality is, or would it, would it? unfortunately i think i'm a cynic at heart.

____


(Sunday, 11 June 2006)
(in response to what i wrote on Friday. and other things)

but God is not a function, God is not an accessory, not a compartmentalizable part of the self, not even a part of the self, in the mind, God is not a tame God. and i, i would like to not have to wrestle my christian identity into an embrace. the whole let go, let God, it all sounds so cheesy, and that might be why i am finding it so difficult to admit and accept. which really doesn't at all mean that i can choose to run in the other direction, because that's called fear, and cowardice, and i am all those things but really, truth and what i am isn't going to change to fit what feels the most comfortable, or what is the best for my socio-emotional resume.

i know i write like God is not a part of my life, like my happiness right now might be reduced to holiday fixes, music and sunshine and the wreckless abandonment of my work, but it really isn't like that, at all. or it has not been, this time, and i would like fight this urge to take things into my own hands, all over again. my christian identity is something i need to come to terms with, because, i am in some ways ashamed to believe and i can't get around that. the relinquishing sovereignty over my life to God has been the most terrifying and liberating thing, and i don't want to be a hypocrite again, so i should at least admit firstly that i am a christian, (not just someone who goes to church and has all these christianish habits, but that i believe in God and Jesus Christ and the payment for my sins and eternal life), and secondly i should also admit that i am ashamed to be one, in some ways. i want to stop fighting myself, to stop oscillating between faith and the cynical so-called intelligent disbelief, i don't want to fight my christian identity anymore. there's a cynic in me that would like to jump around asserting things, but i think at the end of the day there is hope, there is purpose, there is the ultimate point, that speaks to me more than reason ever might. and saying all this just makes me realise that i feel this need to give reasons for why i believe, when really, i think my reasons go beyond words, or rather,t i don't need reasons. i find it difficult to explain because i am so reliably full of cynicism, sometimes, and for every arguement i can think of some other logical loophole, that has been missed. but stuff the logic, really, because it fails to cut it. God has done something with me and that's how i know He is real. and yet the rejection of that value system has been impossibly difficult, at times i'm so full of Rational Explanations for the things that have taken place, when at the end of the day it just leaves me feeling so very empty. like i am not the person that i am, not the person that something inside tells me i am, but rather a faceless something that is not a person that the rest of the world, conventional wisdom, worldly yardsticks and the media, tells me that i am. and of course i feel hollow, displaced. and of course, i am happier, more at peace with myself, the moment i stop fighting God, the God who made me and knows me and loves me enough to bother with me when i'm just full of this hypocritical bullshit. who wouldn't be happier, who wouldn't feel like they had been set free. when i experience God working in me, i don't need to be told to praise, to sing, to love, and a lot of things. there is no other more natural response.

________


this is a very strange post. but it is three am and abruptly time to fold my mind in two, and stow it safely under the seat in front of me. so much for coherence, good night.