World Loading... Please Wait

And there, in the quiet, just before waking, everything is fine.  Then the world loads and all that bothered you from when you went to sleep is right back to being in view.

You suddenly remember the stress you’ve been holding onto.  You remember the people that you hurt or how they hurt you.  You remember the sadness and anger of the world you left for a bit as you tried to just get some rest.

What is that phenomena?  Those brief few seconds where you wake up and you don’t remember the pain you had before.   Then, just as you get that smile on your face, it all just seeps back in.  That has to suck.  It’s like that one scene in Ladyhawke where Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfieffer have that brief interaction at dawn.  Both of them are human at the same time and almost get a glimpse of one another.    When you’re in a funk, every day is like that.  You wake up with the fleeting glimpse of something you love, just out of reach, and as it all comes into focus it disappears and you are left with the knowing that everything was crap like before.

World lag in real life.   I wonder if it’s a chemical in your brain.  Maybe that service hasn’t come online yet.  Maybe it’s a part of your brain that deals with reality and when you wake up, it takes a little longer to kick in.  It’s too bad you can’t disable it.  Maybe kill the process from your internal task manager.   Then, you could crawl out of bed, and function for awhile.   Later on, you could enable it and let it take over for awhile when nothing important is going on.  Kind of like how I deal with weekly virus scans or mandatory system updates.  Push that shit to late at night when you don’t care.   Except, that’s when it’s the worst. 

You’re in the quiet of your brain and that little voice says, “Hey… I know… remember that problem you can’t solve?  Let’s run that at max capacity and overheat your brain.  Come on, it’ll be fun!  Sure you’d rather watch some good shows or play video games or get sleep, but I’d rather run overload your system with over analysis of every little issue you have going on…. And all at the same time.”

When you finally do get to sleep, it all gets quiet and if you’re lucky, you can have a pleasant dream or at least a couple nice thoughts as you recharge.  But then, when you wake up…  BOOM, servers go online and it kicks in and you suddenly remember, “Nothing got resolved at 1:00 AM.”

Yeah, like a computer or a particular application, just walking away from it for awhile doesn’t fix it.   It’ll be there when you come back and will probably have done more damage to your system if you don’t fix it.   But in this analogy, more memory doesn’t always mean increased performance.  So, take care and get help when you have that extra CPU intensive process running in your head.     It’s not good to melt the circuitry. 

It sure as hell doesn’t help World Lag.  It just crashes harder and for longer each time.

What's Left In Pandora's Box

Sometimes we become so despondent that we cling to the wrong things.  A man sinking in quicksand might reach for a poisonous snake if he thought it could support his weight and help him escape.  Desperate times call for even more desperate measures.   Cliches as long as your arm will come to mind.

In your life, you may find yourself having to open a Pandora’s Box.   You do it, not because of curiosity, but because there is no other way to begin the healing process.   You dread it.   You rationalize keeping it closed.  You bargain with yourself that it will get better without getting worse.   However, in the end, the box gets opened, consciously or subconsciously.  All you can do is let it envelope you and swim against the current to dry land.   The worst part is that you can’t see the shore.  You have no bearing on where it is.   You could unknowingly swim back towards the whirlpool that looks to suck you down into the dark abyss, and almost not realize it.  

Yes, there are days when you want to crawl into that hole, turn on the depressing music, and poke at the scabs on your soul because feeling that pain is better than nothing at all.  And in that hole, you see the one thing left that wasn’t let out of Pandora’s Box.  That’s when the evils in the world look friendly and safe.   Drugs.  Alcohol.  Harming yourself or others.  And there in the darkness is that one thing, above all else, that you could cling to.   Hope.   

But sometimes, we need hope.  Sometimes the pain is too deep and great to simply let it all in.  Sometimes to get through the darkest parts of the process, we need to latch onto a life raft full of needles while we wear a suit of armor made of water balloons.  We could ultimately end up drowning from within, but there is a chance we can survive it and that is better than drowning out in the open.   Hope is something that if handled correctly, could be a lifeline. 

The problem is that you can put too much faith in hope.  Hope is still an evil.   You may hope that you can fix everything and go back to the way it was.  That could very well be, but most likely, it won’t.    Hope can also push you blindly into another direction.  You can put all your faith in hoping for a certain solution and you don’t see that it’s not a solution at all.   When that hope gets dashed, you fall faster and deeper back towards the brink.  You may even go over.

I’m saying you shouldn’t rely on hope.   It can be a powerful thing.  Hope can be a light in the darkness.  It can be a magical sword that slays any and all monsters in your path.  

The one thing to remember is that hope best serves you in limited stretches.   It’s like the star in Super Mario Bros. that makes you invincible, but it’s limited and will run out.   It’s that tire in your trunk.  You put it on, when you have a flat, but you can’t drive fast or take on tough terrain.  You slowly work towards the goal of getting a new tire at a service station down the road.  Don’t abuse hope or put all of your faith in it.  It’s just a temporary fix.   

If treat hope with respect and fairness it will help.  If you use it as a shield, running headlong into danger, it will crack and leave you defenseless.    But, sometimes, in the darkness, it’s the best choice to light the way out.  That is why hope was trapped in the box.  If left open, it would have escaped with all the other evils into the world.  In the box, you can use it when you need it, but you have to put it back or it will escape and betray you.   Never lose hope.

Other people can be your hope, but not your savior.  They can give you hope but you are your own savior.

Religion can be your hope, but without faith in yourself, it’s only temporary.

Trust in you.  Trust in the process.   Trust that hope will carry you to the shore and will then let you lead, never interfering with choosing the right path.  If others are with you, then that’s great.    However, if you are alone, that’s OK, too.  You are all you need to survive.  You and a little hope tucked away.