It’s an interesting feeling… My mind takes me to an isolated mountain in the snow, alone in a small wooden house. Low lights… my eyes dim as they stare into the half-light, unfocused…the slow sound of a steady wind flowing outside. Occasional gusts whip powdered snow into the air…
It’s like a chasm inside of me, gnawing closer at times to my heart, other times filled briefly by kind moments, friendship, or good news. The ever-increasing lostness at what my life should be – what I should live for, what I’m here for. Like the wind, my life flows past me constantly…time dwindles down. Often I wake up thinking, “another day,” and question whether it’ll be my last. The day my hand slips on the steering wheel, the day someone forgets to stop. Maybe it’s the day I hear life-shattering news about my family or friends, or get laid-off, or lose something dear to me. Or maybe it’s just another day…
Even the good days can leave a feeling like this. You do well at work – you make a funny comment – for what? For someone to think momentarily better of you? So that you can become another nameless higher title? I have little time for these questions as I hurry to get out the door on time. They fall to the back of my mind as I queue up music to drown the thoughts, only to return in the quiet moments of the evening, when I return home, alone.
Therapists tend to look at these sorts of thoughts as morose, or perhaps, as signals of a depression or anxiety – yet they can rarely answer the questions for themselves. There are techniques of distracting yourself from the undercurrent of sadness prevailing through life, yet they often simply allow you to go down as the herd does – unconscious of the state of man, bound as we are without answers. Could someone reach down and touch me and tell me what this all means?
There is something in the bravery that faces death head on, with its shoulders up, looking it in the eyes, and refusing to flinch in the contest that ensues, with failure almost a complete certainty. Is a shadow of this bravery found in facing rejection? In positing a future, a dream, only to have that vision crushed?
Not all visions deserve to be born into reality, to take shape and physical form – yet a certain sadness manifests even when unrealistic visions cease their existence in the land of possibility. A dream I once walked in no longer can exist. The thought proved to be false. That future will never be.
There is some comfort in that, though you intended to walk into a different future, you are walking into a future nonetheless, where outcomes are possible you’d have never considered. Here, there is another opportunity to reach into chaos to seize a new life, one better than the lying dream you held onto before.
At least it’s real.
Still, the rejection aches. Like my writings on church, I sometimes wonder if all I’m really looking for in a girl is a warm hug. An *understanding* warm hug, like the one at the end of Good Will Hunting, one that sees you for who you are – a lonely child behind a window of complexity – and still loves you for it. Rejection is like the opposite of this sort of hug, more like a shove away which makes you feel self-conscious of your reaching out for the hug in the first place. A little glimpse of the inner child, just to tell it to get lost and go away.
Reading the book about Tony Bennett’s basketball program, one theme I’ve seen is how Tony and the coaching staff’s investment in the kids pays off. The teammates play harder, train harder, and work harder when they know their coach is committed to making them better, to investing in them, to believing in them. Perhaps rejection is a sort of vote of no-confidence. A vote of no potential. Regardless of who is doing it, it makes you think twice, as the idea you have no place in someone’s future sounds a little too close to the idea that you have no future, which is a terrifying thought at its core.
At the same time, God gives us a measure of life and lights the flame – like a slowly burning cigarette. We all have no future eventually. What will we do with it? Giving love is one of the few things I truly believe in at an emotional level. When I can’t do that, I run out of answers fairly quickly, and I’m left with the sort of darkness I mentioned at the beginning of this writing – the emptiness that inhabits me at nighttime, or in the early hours of the morning. At the end of the day, it’s not really about the rejection, but about being a man slowly running out of answers. Answers about the world, sure – but fundamentally, answers about myself. Why am I here? What justifies my being here? Why do I exist?
It would be more dramatic to end things here, but maybe, at the end of the day, it is about love.
“1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,[1] but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;[2] 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
The moments in life that we remember most are these moments of love, because they never end. There’s a way that thinking back to those moments still provides warmth on days or nights like these when life feels a little colder. Remembering the way I could endure even stressful nights because I cared about something or someone that much. I didn’t have to rationalize it – it was love. And love of that sort touches you in such a way as to be different thereafter. If we’re lucky, we feel this way about our families and friends, too.
I am lucky.
Where Words Increase 