I put complete faith in it my entire life. I grew up believing that it carried some sort of virtue; a personal regality and honor meant for nobility. Blindly I trusted it as I let it lead me from each phase of life as if I were just a naive flock of sheep. Yet if I take the time to acknowledge it, there hasn’t been any aspect of my inner workings that has been the breeding ground of more betrayal than my own word.
How many times I tell myself that I’d never do this or never do that– I’ll always do this or do that, and with a will cast in brawn and smoldering iron I possess unrelenting faith in these things I tell myself. Yet, as I continue to take new forms, shapes and molds, I turn my back on these concrete words I’ve placed within myself and never look back when I betray it. Not even for a single lost strand of time in the universe, not even in the moment it takes an electron to compete a single orbit around its nucleus do I even acknowledge this continual and villainous betrayal of myself. Well this is that acknowledgment.
Even without that acknowledgment, I still justify to myself, “well this is just me growing.” Our whole lives we are led to think that the personal growth of a human is akin to a tree, sprawling outward and upward. Linearly tracing this path of thinking I could tell myself today that when I was 15 I couldn’t see as far out on the landscape of the world, but if we do, as individuals and minds, grow like trees, then odds are we are stunted, deformed, mutated, miserable weeds that are merely disguised as trees. So maybe at 24 I have a greater, broader perspective than I did a year ago, five years ago, or as a teenager, but for all I know, maybe I ended up burying my head in the sand on other things. What I believe to be improved vision could just be the darkness of the earth. I’m not here to argue or dispute any of those possibilities, my point is that I will stand firm in my word today, as I was yesterday. Tomorrow, I may have no memory of that. It’s an odd little thing. I know that my word and myself betray each other often, I admit to that right now. I am still telling myself, right now in this moment, that I’m a rock. So I look in the mirror and expect to see a rock. Maybe last week I was also telling myself that I am a silent shadow, and this week I’m a firework, but still, if I believe I’m a rock right now, then even with that questionable track record– even knowing that eventually something I assured myself was true about myself will become a total falsehood, I still, in the most absolute of faith will believe that I’m a rock for as long as I can tell.
Maybe my word will betray me on that. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. It’s an odd little thing.
So are the thoughts that replace sleeping.