Category: Personhood >>> The Light Above Your Head Goes On

Being a living human being for a length of time is a bit like being a deep sea diver who jumped in quite a long time ago and has never done anything, and will never do anything, except descend. We don't usually think of time is a physical object, but it is. It is the ocean through which we are descending.


My body is my diving suit. But not just my body. My body, as well as being a literal reality, is a symbol/incarnation of that personal self that makes the human journey. The human journey down. Further in time means further in depth. Of course, depth means pressure. Therefore to live and grow older and mature - hopefully these three will coincide somewhat - is to become less and less hard, more and more vulnerable, and eventually even feeble, in the face of the growing, tremendously increasing, pressure.


Now of course, this word pressure carries negative connotations, and very often the impingements of increasing time and increasing depth are not pleasant. But is not necessarily so. It only need be so when we are fighting the process that, after all, is inevitable, and therefore may as well be right. To habitually fight the process is to become a sort of caricature of a human being. Brittle. Pitiful. Joyless. And the very telling word that sums it all up: shallow.


Every now and again, we have that experience that some portion of that impinging, inevitable, deepening Reality has been, to mix the metaphor, knocking on the door for quite some time, and we finally have reached a point where we either are ready to welcome to in - let it press up against us, or, in the image that has just come to mind, attach itself to us like the tiny fish that cling to the whale - or we're simply tired of resisting. Our hardness yields, and that piece of reality enters. The bell rings. The ball drops. The breath bubbles to the surface. Or in the cliche metaphor, the light goes on.


At that moment, we feel as though we have just discovered the secret of all life. It may be a mere trifle, may be taken for granted by nine out of ten other people young and old, but to us is new, profoundly so, and it fills a gap that has been waiting for it for a long time. It connects so many other parts that, until now, seemed disconnected. You feel like you want to hold on to that experience for ever, as if you were holding on to the key to heaven.

Copyright © 2004 Donald L. McIntyre All Rights Reserved