I don’t know about you, but to me life feels a bit like a rollercoaster right now.
I’m nineteen.
Parts of me feel like I’m almost dead. Others feel like they haven’t yet come alive.
It’s as though every day, I’m on a different section of the tracks, bouncing up all of a sudden before being yanked back down again.
One day I’m upside down, the next right side up, then somehow inside out.
I’ve just come up from a drop I was certain was going straight to hell, so naturally I’m a little shaken.
And I’m looking around, every minute, at the faces that surround me. As though I’ve just poked my head above the water and caught my breath, they become clearer and clearer to me with every passing second.
I see pain in us. I see suffering.
It hurts.
I understand why it’s so easy for us to keep our heads tucked neatly under the surface. We can convince ourselves the ripples aren’t our fault that way.
We are animals playing games for our survival every day. We pretend we aren’t aware of it because we can’t stop it. But it rips at us. Our spiritual foundations are being attacked by the way our society is designed and we feel powerless to stop it.
Why should we even acknowledge it at all? What good would it do?
We are too self-important, I fear.
Our species has placed itself, and its success, above the livelihoods of every other living creature on this Earth. The systems we’ve created to guarantee our survival actively destroy this Earth every single day.
Yet we, too, are suffering.
