In throes of sleeplessness

In moments of helplessness, no amount of intelligence or talent or courage can rescue you. After a hard day, an even more difficult night awaits you in bed. Your mind is a minefield of anxieties, and your thoughts tread carelessly all over.

Tonight you want desperately to believe in God. Believe what so many others adhere to and experience solace in. Somebody that doesn't grow estranged, doesn't abandon or die. A solid certainty forever. There’s a fine line between optimism and delusion and you desire more than anything to spring across it. And yet, the embrace of this particular delusion has failed you so often that you give up after a while. There’s so much reason stacked against it, all the hundreds of pages of well-reasoned data, which you’ve tucked into your brain, which is irrefutable. You hate science. Nothing makes sense. Life’s uncertain, illogical, and irrational and it irks you to think why you reason at all in the first place.

You remember all those moments when you sought God and failed miserably. You sampled Sufi music (it might nudge some spiritual core, you thought), searched for signs and symbols, flung your mind open to every argument on the other side of the fence, but all in vain. Once you thought you almost got it. Your first time in that Russian Church across the street- stained glass, vaulted ceiling, and a thick fragrance of incense that reminded you of something familiar, yet retained a peculiarity. The ceremony uplifted you for while; as you let those strange words, comforting in an odd way, pour into your head. (The newly faithful say they’ve had moments like this one, when something awakens within them, something so wonderfully mysterious and profound, that it converts them.)

You sense a force swell within you and carry it delicately back home. You nurture it for a day, and wake up the next morning magically invigorated. You arrive at church the next afternoon, a needle point away from converting to Russian Orthodox, when disappointment strikes you. It’s as profound as the inspiration that swept you yesterday. All you see are rituals and prayers and institutions and priests and extravagances, all the consequences of God that you so deeply resent and hate. You realize you’re a traveler who has ventured too far into the bleak dominion of rationality.

This might turn out to be the most vaguely annoying gibberish I blog in a while, yet perhaps the most satisfying.