Rethinking Life

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes! — Leonardo da Vinci

Myths are, first of all, stories: stories which confront us with something transcendent and eternal . . . a means by which the eternal expresses itself in time. —Rolland Hein

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. — 2 Corinthians 4:16–18

Something is missing. You sense it when you leave for work in the morning or return home after a long day. You catch the scent of it when you gaze upon a sunset over the ocean or stare into the starry night sky. From deep within, we wonder if there is more to life than the relentless machinations of our days. So many adults bury this feeling with busyness and distraction. To acknowledge it would render the things we’ve learned to cling to for significance and security meaningless. So we shove our hearts and that sense of emptiness down into a corner of ourselves that rarely sees the light of day and continue on in the existence we have created for ourselves. We find our worth in the cars we drive, the house in which we survive, and the promotions for which we strive.

There is, however, a stage in life where that hunger inside us is close to the surface, where we are simply human beings, uncut, raw. When we journey through the adolescence of our lives, we encounter the monsters and the demons that cause us to fear really listening to the powerful longings of our hearts. The wounds we receive in adolescence shape our days and our personalities and set self-imposed limits on our lives.