The Never-Ending Journey Of The Wandering Mind

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There’s always those nights where all you do is think. Think about the good, the bad, and even the ugly. You think about everything that happened the past week, day and hour—replaying everything over and over in your head. You wonder what you did wrong and what you did right; but more importantly, you wonder why the world is out to get you—because you’ve been patient & hopeful for so long.

It’s always those nights where you lay there and wonder what could have been, or what should be – those are the nights that hurt you the most. Where your brain just rattles in your head. Where you start to list all your faults and wish they could just float away. Where all your thoughts end up leading to one thing: the difficult journey of life itself. You begin to wonder why everything has to be so difficult? And why a person (mostly you) can’t be born without faults and imperfections. And why we can’t just go to sleep with a wish, and have it come true the next day.

If everything were that simple, happiness wouldn’t exist. Happiness is a result of having hope, but does hope always lead to happiness? Are we 99% sure that what we want out of life will come true one day? Will that 1% drag on for years and years and end up giving us nothing but a frustrated mind? Sometimes that 1% dominates our lives and we become blind sighted by the bad and numb to the good. We let our frustrated, exhausted, busy minds take over and we forget to hold on tight—we become numb to love, to life, and to everything in between.

Because it’s right at the moment when you feel as if everything’s finally beginning to get better. Like maybe, in the midst of all this darkness, you feel as if you’ve found this little spark of light that you can hold on to. And for a second, you’re reassured that everything’s going to be okay. Then, as soon as you reach for it, everything comes falling down again. All your walls start collapsing, and there’s so much debris in the air that you can’t even breathe. And the scariest part is that the debris has always been there, just there, you just haven’t seen it. It was the moment when you believed; the second when hope finally arose and there was a little bit of light – does the world decide to punish you by letting you feel. Just feel. Nothing in particular, but everything — all at once. All of life’s biggest contradictions all punctured into one phrase, one word, one second, one moment.

And maybe it’s then and only then do you actually realize that you can’t do it. That maybe that hope you have is stuck on repeat. It keeps going and going, but never succeeds at trying something new. It’s like a trap made that’s bound for your failure. And when a second ago, you had hope, now you have none. Again. And you’re just sitting there, in the midst of the debris, trying so hard to survive. Just like you’ve done so many times before.

The debris around you may pile, and you begin to want to give up. And when you’ve fallen 7 times and stood up 8 times before, you deep down know you can’t anymore. That’s the feeling that never goes away. And while you know that you’ve let yourself down, you are more worried that the world has let you down; because along the way, you’ve tried so hard to have hope, but the debris became too much to handle.

There will always be debris along the long tunnel of life, but it will always be up to you to strive for that light. The light that lingers. The light that doesn’t define your end, but only your beginning. Because somewhere down the journey, happiness will find its way into your mind. And heck, if you’ve strove for that light 10 times before, strive for it again—and again; because if you don’t, you’ll never get a chance to find out what’s waiting for you on the other side. Those nights of worry and busyness need to turn into nights of hope. Hope is the only action that will ever lead you somewhere safe—somewhere greater than your dreams.

image – Roberto Taddeo