Stripped Away

This is the hard part. The part at which you realize you have erred -badly. The part at which you realize that you alone are responsible for your own errors, that there is nothing and no-one which they can be put upon.

One could make the argument that this is freeing in a way, that "we only see clearly through the lens of pain". Our excuses and our illusions are stripped away, our fantasies and appearances whirling into the maelstrom of reality, leaving only the reality of a situation for us to ponder and act upon. In some semi-mystical way which I don't fully apprehend, we must be deeply confronted before we will deep confront ourselves. For most of us, that can only occur through the painful application of the error and lessons learned.

The great challenge, of course, is remembering: remembering what we have learned when the pain is not so fresh, when the mistake has mellowed in our memory to that of a minor error, when we simply feel "okay" about things. Feeling okay and mellow are not crimes within themselves - so long as we do not forget.

For if we do, the experience is waiting for us around the corner yet again, hovering for the one error that will unleash the flood of self-realization and self-reflection until, at last, we finally learn that which we need.