The greatest thing in my life is the spontaneous confidence that sometimes sneaks up behind me during dark nights when I’m alone with my thoughts. This confidence compels me to start actively preparing for the realization of dreams, which I know with the logical side of my mind that I will never be able to achieve. The dreams have always had more power over me than the structures of my material life – the routines, spaces, and patterns that allow me to get by as a functional adult – and have never been able to be subjected to those structures, or much of any kind of structure at all. Once I stumble upon a tangible dream, even one that I indeed have a reason expectation of being able to achieve, I lose almost all motivation.
Only two things can hold me up from an abyss of unthinking, defiantly aimless hedonism. One of those things is the aforementioned spontaneous confidence, which can pull me out of the hedonic spells precisely because, like the hedonism, the spontaneous confidence is a defiant reaction to the constant tyrannical compulsion of duty. The uniqueness of the spontaneous confidence is that it is akin to both hope and to despair. Its relationship to hope arises from its spark, originating in the need to make reality acknowledge the insubstantial heavens of shining possibilities that always loom directly overhead. Thus the spontaneous confidence is conceived out of the inexhaustible, a glimmer from the noon-day sun reflected on the shiny copper finish on the outside of a newly minted single-cent coin. However, the spontaneous confidence only ever happens during experiences of active despair. This is because the agony of futility creates the impulse to act together with a sardonic disdain for incremental achievement that produces confidence in the experienced moment. In this way, the spontaneous confidence is a bubble of ironic acceptance that can even appreciate the high virtue hope, while existing entirely inside of the void of despair and total dysfunction.
Someday there’s going to be a time when directed external goals and inner motivation can be united. That day will see the unification of hope with material confidence. Until then, I will carry on travelling through my life at warp speed. The external universal will flash by me in a daze as I dash through it toward a dark destination beyond the limits of objective space. But the transcendent Hope that hangs fixed in the eternal Light from outside the cosmos has an ally here in my little bubble. This little, fragile Hope that I hold this moment holds together my material existence against the crushing, paralyzing force of possibility.
Suddenly, everything I’ve tried to do is everything I could do. Suddenly, my fruitless efforts are justified in the face of an eternity that nullifies the temporal meaning of material success. I have no strength to stand against the hopeless future or the tyrannical past, but the wonderful chaotic hope of the free present is literally always with me.
Image by Feng Yu, licensed from Adobe Stock.
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