The image of the Phoenix rising from the ashes is powerful.
It’s about transcendence, transformation, overcoming obstacles, victory.
But you can’t rise above your circumstances without being in your circumstances first, and you can’t be in your circumstances if you don’t allow yourself to feel through them.
And not pick-and-choose feeling. I want to feel happiness, but I refuse to acknowledge pain. I want to be stimulated, because I don’t want to feel something else—boredom or stillness or simply being.
Life is tricky in that respect. You can definitely (and people do) move through life without a great amount of feeling attached to their daily experiences.
I understand that at one level. We’re all doing the best we can. For some people, to truly feel means to get in touch with things that are so unfamiliar and unknown that to actually feel them would be almost excruciatingly scary. So they choose instead a sort of somnambulistic (sleepwalking) state through life.
They desensitize themselves to the real vicissitudes of life—the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the bursts of madness and anxiety and desire and love and hope and excitement. To live in those
Leave a Reply