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Are you there God, it's me, Noël

There are lots of things that are not definite in my mind. What readings should I be cramming in tonight? Will I get a parking ticket if I don't move my car? When am I going to sneak a nap in? Can the premise I'm about to write about even logically be developed from our journal assignment? Yes, there are many worries racing through my mind. However, of all the uncertainties to plague the human mind, the questions "Is there life after death" and "Is there a God" have to be the most global and far-reaching uncertainties of all. I am not alone in my questioning and fretting. Everything that I've ever learned and have accumulated at this point leaves me in an even bigger fit of confusion. Being exposed to so many cultures, people, and religions, and watching human hypocrisy, greed, and dishonesty overcome so many good intentions merely exacerbates my incredulousness. I've been haunted with emptiness for years and have explored the explanations of my ancestors. I dream at night of galaxies and space, of blackness and light, of heaven and hell, of love and death and of--God.

On nights that I'm feeling particularly lonely, and weather permitting, I step out and look up at the sky. I'm not looking for any one constellation or the movements of Mars or the moon, I already have a pretty good handle on those already. I instead get lost in the blackness, the infinite possibilities that go way beyond my perception. Ignoring the pain in my neck and the coldness nipping at my fingers and nose, I immerse myself in the unknown, and once I "stop rationalizing and focus on exploration," I expose myself to what is described by Czikszentmihalyi as a "flow experience" (181). The "worry and anxiety" about "imagined future events" that propelled my excursion are most definitely "momentarily suspend[ed]" (181). I essentially lose control over everything that I know or think I know. I descend into what Jung and Freud described as a sort of state of unconscious, or more appropriately, what Goldberg calls the "wild mind" (180, 195). And I thought it was very poignant that the literal "big sky" that I occasionally lose myself to is truly my metaphorical "wild mind" as well (180).

The fear and anxiety melts away, and all that I perceive is strictly in the here and now. I embrace the knowledge "of how everything is but nobody knows what it really is or how it came to be" (186.) The stars, the space, the eternity represented by my small stature on this immense planet and its relative significance in comparison to the galaxy— this is as close to coming to the "mystery" as I'll ever be (186). That we are "but a speck in an unfathomably large universe" consoles me, and though I could never put it into such words, I get the unshakeable feeling that "a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe"(184).

I eventually become satiated with peace, and the tide of my worries ebbs back into the inner recesses of my soul. The worries will come back, and my gods will challenge my senses once again. The collective unconscious wills it, and I am proud to be apart of the mystery that will be passed down for generations to come.