Life Begins After Losing

Perhaps, life only can truly begin when all is lost.

Only when we cease to strive after the wind.

The ambitions of achievement, power, and position are vanquished from possibility.

Possessions, attachments, and idols burned as chaff.

Ideologies dislodged from their dusty shelves in the back of the mind.

When clamoring for rights suddenly sickens the stomach as if it were three days rotten seafood.

Knowing solutions professed by all sides of human endeavors lack the foresight to understand.

Lost in the midst of these arbitrary identifications, only there can the profane be silenced.

When human life becomes redder in tooth and claw than the most vicious of nature's predators, power struggles and perversions become apparent.

Those who claim certainty, yet lack the solid footing of facts, reasoning, or wisdom become blights on the atlas of history.

Discord, death, arguments, and isolation result from the inherent achievement of individuals lacking the prudence to care for their fellow man.

It is readily evident in the mannerisms of all classes of people in society as each seeks only their own ends.

And it must be lost.

Transformation must take place.

A transformation that brings all people to their knees.

Arguments dissipate as no one needs to win.

Wars disappear as boundaries, self-defense, or national interest become as absurd a notion as they truly are.

Desires for moral legislation on others, while maintaining freedoms for oneself, become a thing of the past. 

Power struggles become community meals as the politics of authority are replaced by mutual beneficence.

Swords are turned into plowshares; tanks into tractors; handguns into water wells.

Violence tears a part of our nature away from us all. Even those who perpetuate the violence.

Life is broken as long as self-interest trumps love, as long as profit trumps wisdom.

The kicking and screaming against this stripping away of the lust of the eyes and the pride of life must stop eventually.

Nothing is left in selfish ambition or ideological modernism.

Such is the place, the only place, where life begins. 

It is the place where the door is opened to the heart, and God may enter.