Standing in the Waters of Safety and Living

Lately I have been obsessed with trying to control every aspect of my life. It seemed to easy to follow the example that my aunt and uncle have set here, so tempting to be in charge of things so that life would be manageable. So that life would be easy. But it was never about being easy was it? It was about living. I woke up this morning and realised that even if I keep on saying that I need to live, I have not been doing much of that.

I keep on thinking about what’s going on in my life, what’s happening, what I’m doing and what its consequences are. I pre-empt them, I crush whatever consequences might come before even allowing myself to revel in the glory of what I have done. Picturing a life so perfect in that box of which limits I set seemed so beautiful. But I would be fooling myself if I allow that to go on.

I have to stop. I have to stop thinking and start feeling. Experiencing.

Maybe that is one good thing that people with religious faith have—that unquestioning surrender to a force greater than they are. But it is lacking, with their surrender comes a surrender of their own emotions, of their own experiences. “All for His Glory,” they say. Perhaps I am a selfish person for wanting to live my life for me and not for anyone else.

The world it far too beautiful. Far too grand. I cannot simply surrender it all to an institution that seeks to control my every thought, word and feeling.

As I reflect upon my thoughts early this morning, I ask myself why I bother at all to write it down if I claim I need to stop thinking and start to live. I’ve found no answer within my self, but for the fact that this seems the most natural thing for me to do. I am a writer, I write. Part of living, part of experiencing everything I do, of amplifying the gravity of my emotions, I find in the comfort of words.

And so I write.

Surrender.

Relationships were something that I did not fancy myself in because I believed it would hold me back. Because it would strap me down into an existence of a routine. I realise now that I thought that because of my experience with my past relationship. I allowed it to fall into a state of complete stability, of complete security that it seemed like it could never go wrong. Every single aspect was set in stone, controlled, and every motion fulfilled for the day to be complete. One cannot possibly imagine how hard that was for someone as spontaneous as I.

To be fair to myself, as kind as Kyle was, he never understood how my mind worked. He refused to see a certain side of me, that reckless side. He acknowledged it existed, but cast it into a shadowy corner so that he would never have to see it. All of the things I did which were not to his liking, he brushed off. He held not a mirror that showed a reflection of myself, but a portrait idealising the woman that he wanted me to be. Everything was so clear for him.

Life was never clear for me.

If I surrender to the wind every single part of my life, including this fear of commitment, stability and structure what are the chances that things would not fall into routine? I suppose it will be as easy to race back to the start again to leave it all coldly behind, coming back only when the path is devoid of those which I so fear. But maybe a part of truly surrendering is to allow myself to take that step into the unknown.

But I’m afraid. I’m afraid and I don’t want to leave this place where I feel safe. It now is as if I am standing at the edge of a lake, with my feet in the water, feeling its beauty to some minimal degree, but not experiencing it.

Jump, everything in me says.

But my mind refuses to allow me such an act.