Love's The Only Engine Of Survival

There is no method to this anxiety, this imprint of a ghostly skeleton's palm embedded on my chest. Why can I still hear its voice? Why this cavernous echo from a time long past when I awkwardly built glistening sandcastles on the beach and held the cool waves at bay?

Why this heavy burden on my youthful-looking shoulders, this burden that includes bullies and long-fought battles, Zehaf-Bibeau and Bieber, firebombs and families bickering in the checkout line? Al-Qaeda and cancer, homophobia, heart attacks, and Halle Berry's custody battle. PVR-ing SVU. Poverty and Kanye, Franklin Graham and Boko Haram.

Busyness may be mankind's business, our fascination with the macabre a predilection. Still-forming plans for a future that may or may not exist weigh us down; we continue in the hamster wheel, all the while thinking we are making progress by doing something. Every moment that we live in the future, a piece of us dies now.

In this moment of weariness, we stop, we breathe, there is nothing but now. In the now, we reclaim our inner light, we slow down. We shuffle off this ugly coil, and remember what we have long forgotten.

Mark Andrew Nouwen