It’s the first week back in classes, and I feel the pull of an unsettling force. One minute I am weighed down by it, the next I feel uplifted. But it’s all the same things.
To feel this tension is to know that I am alive. Every man has tried to grasp it—none have succeeded. In the depths of this feeling, I can’t differentiate anxiety and excitement. Yet for some reason I feel the need to retrace it every waking moment.I feel it most in the moment I am drifting—from sleep to wakefulness or wearisome to rest.
Why do these feelings plague my thoughts when I don’t even know what they are? Their absence defines them; they define me.
In writing I can only begin to describe the feeling, but the sensors of the brain can only relate so much. It could be of the soul, as Oswald Chambers points to in My Utmost for His Highest:
January 9 - My soul has horizons further away than those of early mornings, deeper darkness than the nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain peaks, greater depths than any sea in nature.
This is why my mind is unable to translate the feeling. It's already gone once it is here, it exists without existing. My mind cannot comprehend, but my soul can feel it.
How can this be? That the things inside can rule me? I am in control?
I ask myself these questions a lot, most often in times that cannot be truthfully explained because of the sheer complexity of the experience. I feel like I am trapped between two worlds, floating in space, unable to move, the walls closing in. And I can do nothing but watch, and sense, the whole thing unfold.
I’m reminded of this quote by Plato at the moment:
So if a man has become absorbed in his appetites or his ambitions and takes great pains to further them, all his thoughts are bound to become merely mortal…on the other hand, if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp.
What I’m feeling could be the eradication of mortal thought and the continuation of immortal ones. One world pressing in, the world of money and jobs and responsibilities and life-problems. The other, the world of truth and divine thought and learning and thoughtful representations of reality. Possibly the most confusing part of all is that I cannot say whether it feels good or bad. Like I said, I am caught in the between.
This is usually the part where I can stand up and state my conclusion: that I’ve learned something through this writing! However, this is not the case. Who knows what this means to me right now. Maybe nothing, but surely it will mean something to me down the road.
