Taking It to Our Knees - Not Defined By a Journey Gone Wrong

Not Defined by a Journey Gone Wrong

“To let myself be defined by my greatest mistakes is my greatest mistake.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

Hi, I’m Craig Lounsbrough

Welcome to LifeTalk

It seems that we have some vague sense of where we’re going in this thing called life. For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined. For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered. Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.

Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is. We have this instinctually primal sense that it’s there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is. Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we’re going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else. 

 

The Detours We Create

Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going. There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. However it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.

 

The Detours Life Creates

But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it. There’s a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it’s bound to show up. When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point.

 Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us. Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us.

 

Casual and Careless

Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the exquisite sanctity of life and the priceless privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try? And so, we drift without knowing that we’re drifting because we’re no longer paying attention.

 

Preoccupied with Pabulum

Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears. We’re caught in small things, and the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.

 

Along for the Ride

Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We then turn to the hovel of our small agendas because it’s the only place that we now have to go. We become so entangled in the pull of our own flimsy agendas that we serve agendas that serve no other purpose than serving our agendas. Assuming we’re on a ride that we can’t direct, the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.

 

The Walls of Denial

At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it. The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.       

 

Ending Up Somewhere

We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey.  We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant and we may take a backseat to passivity. If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred. However it happens, we will end up somewhere.

 

Defined by a Journey Gone Wrong

To whatever degree we have done it, we have contributed to where we find ourselves at this moment. The causations may have been largely of our making. Our poor decisions and impulsive choices may have landed us in dark places. We may have believed in the wrong things and justified those beliefs in spite of the painful outcomes that they repeatedly laid at our feet. We may have thought wrong, thought selfishly, abandoned any forethought, or not thought at all. Therefore, we thought ourselves to where we never thought we would be.

We may well be the author of our destinations and the surveyor of the roads that brought us to these places. Those places might be barren. They may be empty of everything for which we had hoped and void of the slightest piece of our slightest dreams. We may see no way out of them and therefore assume that we will be forced to surrender the rest of our lives journeying further into them.

All of this may be true. But what is truer is that you are not your destination. Your lack of judgement at a crucial crossroads may have placed you here, but you are more than the place at which you have arrived. Bad choices and even worse passions may have landed you in the wasteland that you’re living in. But you are not what you see around you. You are not the place within which you have put yourself.

You are more than the choices that you made and the beliefs that you errantly embraced. You are more. And because you are, the place you are at is not the place where you will are doomed to live. You are more than what surrounds you and so is your future.  

You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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