I know not how long I’ve known the feeling that all is passing. It feels like the concept has been with me forever. Yet I don’t know how to easily let go of what affects me strongly. As I grow and wonder, with less fear, about my expiration and with more curiosity about where, how, and of my state of being when I should run into cessation, my embrace of the belief that I do not know grows stronger. Maybe like St. Augustine said, we know but have forgotten. In that case, to live as truthfully as one can is the process of remembering. 

But where am I going? How can I know now what I have never known? What is next? How can I answer, when I know I do not really know what ought to be next? How can I say I know what I want, when I have come to know what I believe myself in want of, in gaining, as insufficient? 

I see that I have to accept my blindness, so as to see that which I am blind to. If I am constantly learning that I need what I initially did not care for, how can I pretend or lie that I know what I desire? In other words, what I desire is what I do not know, and all that I have known have proven to be somewhat  undesirable. That the actuality of a feeling is not the same outside of feeling, i. e., it does not equate the object that arouses said emotions. Oftentimes it is not the object to which the emotions are owned but what one senses in the object yet does not know, or knows as the unknown. That which I crave is not that which I crave but that which I do not know I crave. 

All that I have to offer is given to me to offer and thus to make these offerings is to function as I ought to. The situation is that I am simply lost and to know myself to be lost is the process of self-discovery. Just as what will be will be as it ought to be. Hence I must love, to hurt, just as I must hurt, to love. I ought to  laugh to cry and to cry into laughter. I must fall to understand what it means to stand and what it means to fall. 

Forever awaits and the finite never pauses because the present walks on, sometimes run, and sometimes crawls. I see that I am a fool and to be happy, I must remain a fool, even when it is painful. I am lucky to breathe––I am lucky in being! I see that I am always where I need to be even when I wish to be elsewhere.  I must always, always, always trust that it will all be well, as Julian of Norwich said, because what sustains us is love: all that is true is all that is beautiful which is true wisdom and a bliss called Love. Of course, that I do not understand is because I think the translucent is transparent

I owe my growth in thinking and the beautiful opportunity of a graduate degree to many and I have mentioned some here on this blog a couple of times, but one incredibly awesome person whom I have neglected to mention is my über cool graduate deputy, James Davis. He gave me the priceless gift of believing in me and thus giving me an opportunity that I had originally not asked for and did not believe I needed. One could not find a better graduate deputy anywhere––no professor had ever listened to me, really listened, as Prof. Davis always did. One always walked out of his office feeling lighter, understood.

So long grad school! The process had been everything I would have asked for if I had known what to ask for.
—
J. A. Odartey