trouble song

As usual when troubled deeply I feel aimless, achy inside, alternately angry and bewildered. I want to talk to someone, anyone, and then realize I don't.

My little philosophy books are very comforting when I'm in this state.

I continue noticing how hard it is to be close to people or care about anything that is not under my control ... and remembering all the stoic lessons about pain which i've applied to physical pain so many times and try to apply them here. It seems clear to me why people find the Bible or other texts comforting and they mentally cite verses to themselves. (If only they would stick to the *good* ones.) It's nice to have my different translations... here is one about pain from Book Eight of Meditations.

Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, just lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to . . .? That's what we do to ourselves - or try to - when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish.

You have torn yourself away from unity - your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you've cut yourself off from it.
But you have one advantage here: you can reattach yourself. A privilege God has granted to no other part of no other whole - to be separated, cut away, and reunited. but look how he's singled us out. He's allowed us not to be broken off in the first place, and when we are he's allowed us to return, to graft ourselves back on, and take up our old position once again: part of a whole.

Nice but I still like the Maxwell Staniforth the best:

You have perhaps seen a severed hand or foot, or a head lying by itself apart from its body. That is the state to which a man is doing his best to reduce himself, when he refuses to accept what befalls him and breaks away from his fellows, or when he acts for selfish ends alone. Then you become an outcast from the unity of Nature; though born a part of it, you have cut yourself away with your own hand.

Yet here is the beautiful thought: that it still lies in your own power to reunite yourself. No other part of creation has been so favoured by God with permission to come together again, after once being sundered and divided. Behold, then, his goodness, with which he has dignified man: he has put it in his power, not only inititally to keep himself inseparate from the whole, but afterwards, is separated , to return and be reunited and resume his membership as before.

Sort of like Voltron!

Comments

[wiredferret]

I was thinking more like Play-do.