Monthly Archives: June 2018

What The Hell…

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C.L. Harmon

For me, writing a blog with Mindsets and other bits of knowledge and wisdom gained throughout my life is about several things. One of these is helping others find answers or peace. Others include discovery, pursuing understanding about the human condition and helping people to connect with other people among other objectives. My favorite part about writing anything though is that I can do it while hiding away from the world. It’s safe and it’s private. I have become introverted over the years and spend much of my time in thought and alone. Because of this, much of what I write has hidden meanings and twisted definitions with the purpose of making those who read them to think deeper than they are accustomed to as I do.

I like knowing that I can affect you or impact your life without probably ever meeting you. The only problem with this is that I cannot be affected by you, learn from you. This, what I am doing now, is how I cope without outside help. I write. I share. Having written that, I am just going to talk this time without a point or lesson. I had a very, very bad week. The particulars or causes won’t change anything and so there is no need to write them here. But how certain words and actions made me feel this week, those I will share.

These negatives felt as though I had been hit so hard that my breath couldn’t return to my lungs. Adrenaline, anger, shock and confusion overwhelmed me to the point where my perceived clarity was no longer focused. This is the first time in my life that this has ever happened. Dealing with numerous career disappointments, clinical depression, hardships of many sorts and feeling alone even in a crowd for most of my life has hardened me to the point that feeling is more of a practiced response than an actual expression of true emotion. That certainly changed this week. Damn sure sent me reeling!

So now I am in territory that I have not been in since I was 19. It’s strange and I am still reeling from this burst of real emotion. I don’t know what the hell I am supposed to with this. I am breathing again, but cautiously and very slowly. Is this the way that most people live? If so, it seems like an intense way of living. Of course, I assume most people probably express a little at a time and so maybe the intensity is not that overwhelming as in my case. Still, how does anyone stay sane? Hell, maybe their emotions are what keeps them sane and I am the insane one. As I said, things don’t make a lot of sense to me right now. So I guess it’s possible.

At any rate, there has been something that has come out of this that seems almost out of context in this whole scenario.

I now feel as though I have been looking at life through a dirty window pane for so long that what I have been seeing is not actually what has been going on outside, but illusions made from the images out of the dust on the window. Now that the glass has been shattered, nothing looks familiar. It’s frightening and hopefully enlightening at some point. It’s so bizarre. I have never been stopped dead in my tracks like I was this week. I don’t know how to feel. I have nothing to teach and nothing to give in this writing except personal honesty. But I am writing anyway. Who knows, maybe there is a message even in this rambling. Then again…maybe not. For those of you who read me faithfully and take my writings as messages as to how to cope with life and find peace, please accept my apologies this time. I am only human…as I rediscovered this week.

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In A New Light: Does God Ever Leave Us?

C.L. Harmon

Many times while watching documentaries, I have heard Jewish survivors say that God was no there during that evil period we know as the Holocaust. Each time I would hear one of them say it, an uneasy feeling would pulse through me. I guess as a Christian who has been taught that God is always with me, it gave me pause and challenged my traditional beliefs. To have endured such evil, perhaps I too would feel the same way as these people. I don’t know. But I do know it bothered me. Is God sometimes absent from our lives? For people raised in Christianity, it must seem almost as blasphemy to think such a thought. But I want to know.

I am not sure that the question has an answer. At least not a complete answer we are privy to in this realm of existence. It is intriguing to me though that it’s possible humanity is sometimes responsible for dealing with its own messes. There must have been many people in the world at that time who knew that an evil regime was in power, yet only a few ever tried to stop it. Most in the Axis countries did nothing. Maybe God felt like that He had given enough. Maybe He thought that so much had been given to humanity already and that it was time for us to learn a lesson.

Although those persecuted by the Nazis suffered the greatest as a whole without a doubt, everyone involved in a war suffers to some extent. Each country and each person suffers during conflicts. Perhaps He did step back and expect humanity to step up and finally learn the words by Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”. Maybe this was God’s way of saying that He did not allow this, but humanity allowed it by doing nothing when something had to be done.

If this were true, it would certainly explain a great deal about the miseries we suffer in our own lives. Perhaps free will carries a much greater meaning than we are willing to accept and thus accept its responsibility. As parents, do we not know that by allowing our children to make mistakes, we teach them? Does not requiring them to pay for those mistakes not teach them about the consequences of their actions or failure to act? I do not believe God punishes us for using our free will in poor judgment. I do, however, believe that he allows the consequences from it to serve as life lessons.

I further don’t believe that God ever abandons us entirely at any time. I believe He is always with us but remains silent and inactive while giving humanity the opportunity and the time to do what is right and noble. Perhaps those who believe God was absent in the concentration camps and occupied territories feel that way because God was silent just as he had been the 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament (Malachi’s Warning to the Jewish people). God did not abandon His children then; He remained silent while they found their way back to Him in their practices. Had He decided to abandon them, then what would have been the point of sending Malachi in 430 BC and Christ 430 years later?

These are simply my thoughts, nothing more. I find that writing allows me to explore the questions this life offers me. These writings are not proclamations of truth, but simply investigative writings which help me understand my world. It is always my hope to open up my mind and others’ as to new ways of seeing the world so that we may all have a better understanding of life and the role we play in it.

Thanks for Reading!

 

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Dreams Don’t Grow In The Dark

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By C.L. Harmon

When we lose our direction, we lose more than just our way. We lose ourselves. We are tied to our dreams, and it is the part of which defines us internally. I believe the dream is who we are and not that we are someone with a dream. Our dreams are powerful when we are young. They still seem within reach, and the idea of those dreams becoming elusive has not yet become a reality.

Life, however, is a thief. As days go by, they blend into a period of time and then into a past time. Our dreams begin wandering aimlessly into our subconscious as they no longer have a place in our conscious thoughts. They are as a memory that never happened. They slip into the darkness of our psyches because we feel as though they ask too much from us.

They are in constant need of attention, never fulfilled. It becomes burdensome as it requires more and more to grow. And so we let go, but are left with this sense of abandonment that we cannot explain, yet know it’s real. We feel it always with us; something lost to us but not forgotten. Our dreams are roadmaps in life. They are the directions, not to the most wonderful experiences, but directions out of the chaos of the worst experiences.

Most of us do not think of our dreams in such a way. But do we not think of dreams as paths to betterment? Is not reaching for something out of reach just another way of removing us from the negativity that is ever close to us? We lose ourselves in the chaos because we have stopped moving away from it as it grows. Does it not seem logical that our Creator would give us a tool to escape that which destroys and consumes us? Without our dreams and the pursuit of them, we no longer define who we are but instead become the definition of those who left theirs in the dark recesses of their subconscious.

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