Dabbling In The Expected Unexpected

Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportions to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance tells us that there is no perfect leader. There is no magnificent deed that will solve our self-created misery. Humans are wired to experience their own creations and the creations of others. Many of those creations are self-serving, ambitious attempts to control the practical force that is within us. We lean and beg for relief from men that serve no one except themselves or men that expect their lineage to be honored regardless of the consequences. We worship the isolationists that yearn to separate rather than discern. We kneel down in front of self-righteous lawmakers that speak of God as if that entity needed to express convictions and confirmations. We follow these basket-weaving charlatans away from the truth and find ourselves deeper in the mud of fear.

We do all these things to feel them with our emotions and our soul. We want to stand on the cliff of fear and then ask for a shared parachute that opens in an array of choices. As we float freely through the contemptuous air, we rearrange our mind’s vacillating baggage that we so desperately want to call real. There is no comfort in our beliefs, no vindication in our methods, but we push them into a consolidated box of perceptions. Our illustrious perceptions renovate our life and expand our soul while we continue dabbling in the expected, unexpected.