A light bulb glows because it’s fighting the power coursing through it. The harder it struggles, the brighter the illumination.
That’s the real magic of resistance. You don’t dispel shadows until you can taste the dark, and despite how delicious and overwhelmingly soothing, how easily it intoxicates your mind and makes you forget the sun even exists, you choose to spit it out.
We’re taught from birth to comply, to learn and appreciate certain boundaries. The limits of good taste, of honest work, of propriety and grace. At the same time, we’re shown an ideal – whatever its name or what it looks like, it’s a something that is boundless, limitless, usually invisible, and absolutely beyond the reach of cause and effect. It is supernatural, divine, almighty because it transcends beginning – and therefore, knows no end.
Of course, that makes it an illusion. That makes us yearn for something beyond space, past time, out in the great chasm of nothing, a part of ourselves that is like the thing we made up and have no proof has, does, will, or could possibly exist.
Permanence. As if that kind of power, if we had it even for a split second, is something we could wield, touch, use, or even comprehend. Look around you. This too shall pass. Mountains crumble, dynasties topple, governments and institutions fall into dust and rubble. Even a diamond, once a dinosaur trapped in an aspic of tar, compressed in the earth to an anthracite, then squeezed even further into a shiny piece of glass, is on its way elsewhere. There are no destinations, only journeys.
And no kind of travel is without hardship. That’s one of the reasons it’s so essential to experience places other than the one in which you were born, that safe cocoon that shields you, like an insulating sheath.
Hardship is the beginning of resistance. It is necessary for growth, for compassion, for understanding our interdependence.
Thinking creates the spark. You are the kindling. What are you saving that fuel for?
05 APR 2025
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
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