October 28th, 2024
Life has an interesting way of keeping you on your toes. Just when you least expect it, the life that you know can be ripped right out from under you, before you even have the chance to see it happen. Knowing this, one might reasonably take the time out of their day not only to consider their life today, but where their life might be heading in the future. This practice is not only helpful, but necessary to lay the foundations of a life worth living.
It’s worth noting that enduring the changes of life are a necessary function of being. Each change is an opportunity to reveal and embrace a new dimension of your personhood. Sometimes, these changes are inspiring; they start a fire deep from within your soul that insatiably burns until everything about you has been consumed through its catabolic process. But more often than not, these changes are lackluster, sometimes going entirely unnoticed by you, or those surrounding you. These changes, when left undetected, can slowly begin to eat away at the foundation of your life.
In this, there is an interesting dichotomy that emerges. Most people, from what I gather, fear the fire within. They fear the reality that fires cannot be controlled. They cannot be contained unless you put them out. And I wonder if it is the primary pursuit of most people to spend their entire lives working day after day to extinguish this fire in their lives, or at minimum, build an impenetrable wall to keep the fire as contained as possible. Conversely, the lackluster degeneration of life is slowly growing, like a cancer, undetected for decades. In the shadows, it evolves into the embodiment of insecurity and isolation. While you spent years working to contain the fire, the lackluster degeneration was slowly working to contain you.
Wisdom, conversely and counterintuitively, calls upon life itself to embrace the light and warmth provided from the fire, in order to illuminate the shadows in our lives. Through this, we might be able to see the cancer with our own eyes, and stop the decay before it is too late.
The obvious problem in embracing wisdom in this capacity is that the fire may burn away every element of your life that you thought was you. It may strip away the mirage on your life, revealing not only who you are, but who you are not. Coming to terms with this potential reality is something nearly impossible to face directly. It requires a level of humility that surpasses the masses, and a depth of understanding that takes years to develop. In both regards, personal growth and development is part of this journey.
I would argue that the most successful people in our society are the ones who learn to embrace the fire within themselves at the youngest of ages, letting go of the preconceived notions of family members and friends, in order to pursue the thing that keeps them awake at night. They learn in their youth to absorb judgement from others in a productive manner, one which embraces the wrongfulness of being right. They have successfully allowed their mind to separate from the distractions of life which hold so many people back. And inevitably, with all of these individuals, hard decisions, one’s which are irreversible and life-altering, have to be made. From the outside, we may never know what these decisions are, but it is clear that there is a personal cost, so great, to be a highly functioning individual in our society. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with finance, but everything to do with impact.
Sacrifices made on a monetary basis are inherently measurable, but sacrifices made on an existential basis are impossible to calculate, because they are only known to the person offering the sacrifice. The element of privacy that is built into the very nature of these sacrifices should rightfully give each person the veracity to accept the calling placed upon their own life specifically. However, doing so means embracing a second reality: while others may never know the sacrifices you make, they will always see the ashes left behind.
As you can see, this fire is not only necessary, but it is at the core of all sacrifices worth making. What exactly does it cost a woman to conceive, bear, and raise a child? What exactly does it cost a man to commit to protecting and providing for his family? What exactly does it cost to live a life which leaves behind a legacy?
The common narrative of a materialistic culture is the assumption that both success and the sacrifices to achieve success are both capable of being measured physically. If that were the case, it would hypothetically be possible to put a price on someone’s life. In two expressions this can be described as the net worth of an individual, or the cost to enslave another. One metric, slavery, we agree is wrong, but we have no problem with the concept of net worth.
Here is the problem that I have with this metric: if you reduce the achievements of one’s life to a dollar value, you will never fully captivate the aforementioned existential sacrifices these individuals made privately to destroy the degenerative cancers in their lives, and actively live a life guided by the light of the fire within their soul.
What kind of sacrifices must one make to escape the entanglement of poverty, or traverse the globe for new opportunities? Can we realistically measure these sacrifices on the basis of net worth? I think not.
In conclusion, I ask you this: What is the fire in your soul that is illuminating your life, and what can you do to embrace it’s impact? What does it mean to make existential sacrifices that are immeasurable to the outside world, but so deeply meaningful to you? How would making those sacrifices change the trajectory of your life?