Hello

“This page is not guidance. It is a question I am still asking.”

Hello all, I am Rob. Nice to meet you.

I've been on this planet Earth for around a half-century, and have seen:

Darkness: pain, fear, hatred, anger, ignorance, sorrow, lies, and greed.

I've also seen:

Light: awe, love, joy, wisdom, patience, truth, kindness, and generosity.

I am filled up, with all of these and more, both dark and light. The Darkness is sticky, easy to become a part of you, hard to remove. The Light can be slippery, care must be taken to keep ahold of it.

I have a great desire to move toward the lighter end of this spectrum, but it is harder than it sounds. It takes courage, a lot of will, and a lot of humility to keep improving. It is painful, humbling, draining, disorientating, and it can really shake you.

Mankind has been struggling this same struggle for thousands of years. If the solution were easy, pleasant, we would have found it. We will likely struggle with escaping the darkness until the end of Man. An end possibly brought about because we strayed too far from the light.

A huge hurdle is that it is so much easier to just believe that you are good, there are plenty of examples of others that you can point your finger at and say:

"Ha, no need for me to do all that work, because I don't have the flaw they do. I'm better!"

But we can't see all of another's virtues, or even all of our own vices.

I lucked out, learned earlier in my life that every single person, no matter their reputation or what you think you know, has some ability, quality, some understanding or skill that I will just never match. I try to learn what I can from them, each person I meet a mentor to me. Even if I can't learn, can't improve my ability to do what they do, I still gain. It highlights for me the amazing detail, depth, variety, and potential of this precise machine that we call reality, and it is achingly beautiful. I gain by the act of witnessing.

Impossible, elegant, logical, orderly and chaotic, incomprehensibly perfect yet understandable, the universe is magic made real. It is miracle. It is truth. And it just... lets you be a part of it... for free. You. Not some other potential soul out of the infinite variety of possible souls. You. Only the tiniest fraction of a fraction ever get to be born I figure, this life is the rarest of gifts.

I feel I kind of owe it, to all the never-to-be-born, to do a good job. To not waste the spot I took from them. To show gratitude, to contribute more Light than I do Darkness. To appreciate reality, and really see its Truth. Even when what I see hurts, like seeing how bad of a job I am doing at at. I have to see that, I have to admit it, because that is the ONLY way that I know of to learn to do it better. The only way that I know of to reach for the Light.